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CH4NGING AMERICA 





CHANGING AMERICA 


STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY 


BY 
EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS, Pu.D., LL.D. 


Proressor OF SocioLocy IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 
Author of “ Social Control,’’ ‘* Social Psychology,”’ 
‘** Sin and Society,’’ ‘‘ The Changing Chinese,”’ etc. 





NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 
1912 


Copyright, 1909, 1912, by 
Tue Century Co. 





Copyright, 1908, by The Ridgway Co. 
Copyright, 1910, by The Atlantic Monthly Company 
Copyright, 1912, by The World To-Day 





Published, May, 1912 


REMOTE STORAGE 


TO 





MY IRENIC AND CATHOLIC-MINDED CO-LABORER 
ALBION W. SMALL 








CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 
PAGE 


imme sOTLOOR. FOR PUAIN: FOLK) 8600 6 6 Ceooies ls 2S 


The democratic trend— What democracy is — Causes 
of its growth — Light in the social deeps — Soap and 
water — Decentralized religion— Curbed fecundity — 
The promise of leisure— Help from Science and Art 
— The newspaper cartoon —Immigration and a skew 
distribution of wealth the chief obstacles to democ- 
racy. 


CHAPTER II 


THE WORLD-WIDE ADVANCE oF DreMmMocRACY ... . 20 


Toppling Oriental despotisms — Object lessons from the 
white man — Dynamic role of the missionary educator 
— Rise of a native press— Grim realities of Oriental 
government — How it outrages human nature — The 
passing of power to the shekel — The significance of 
the socialist movement in the West. 


CHAPTER III 


SeeIATELING  DIGTH-WATE (Nj ile ie Oe | ee we we wl BZ 


Malthus unrefuted, but he overlooked certain factors — 
Vast extension of the low-birth-rate area — The fall- 
ing death-rate — How the balance among races may 
be upset— Causes of the fall in the _ birth-rate — 
Social democracy — The downward spread of economic 
wants — The ascent of woman—Good and bad fruits 
of the restriction of fecundity — The probable fetter- 
ing of immigration— The altered horizon of races. 


CHAPTER IV 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INCREASING DIVoRCE ... . 49 


What the facts show — Fallacies respecting the growth 
of divorce — The tendency no sure proof of moral de- 
cay — Economic causes of the movement — Intellectual 
causes — Their probable loss of strength in the near 
future — Remedies. 


CHAPTER V 


MMGIMEN IN INDUSTRY . . 2. . . De Ear eae TE 4” | 


The gathering army of working women— Why they 
enter industry — Most women workers young — Their 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


pathetic helplessness — Why they cannot take care of 
their interests — Conditions worsening — The hotter 
pace of work— The undermining of health — Dam 
age to home and progeny — The futility of individual 
action— The necessity of collective action — Social 
Seton and arid legalism— The true test of 
policy. 


CHAPTER VI 


COMMFRCIALIBM -RAMPANT). <0 0. 1s 0) 9202) Se 


The business fallacy —What commercialism is — Nei- 
ther selfishness nor materialism — The ascendancy of 
business ideals — The relentless expulsion of ‘ senti- 
ment’’ from industry — Standards of success — Ruth- 
less exploitation of resources, natural and human — 
The commercialization of vice —Intrusive advertising 
— Business ideals in relation to politics, education and 
and religion — Remedies. 


CHAPTER VII 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS ... . . 109 


Momentous changes in the newspaper business — Cap- 
italist-owner supplants editor-owner— The manufac- 
turer -of publicity gives the advertiser a dictatorial 
position — Newspaper publishing as a field for invest- 
ment — Progressive commercialization of the daily 
press — ‘“‘ Killing’ live news — “‘Sacred cows ’’— New 
vent-holes for news — The need of an endowed news- 
paper — How to solve the problem of control. 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE MIDDLE WEST— THE FIBER OF THE PEOPLE . . 137 


Sectional misapprehensions — Retarded growth of the 
Middle West —Its losses to the Farther West — Sat- 
uration of the East with the later immigrants — Its 
boom in manufacturing — Genesis of the pioneering 
breed — What type settled the West — The fiber of 
the left-behinds — Signs of deterioration in fished-out 
communities — Folk depletion — Loss of the we-feel- 
ing — Masculinity of the West— The position of 
women, 


CHAPTER IX 


THE MIpDLE WEST— THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 163 


The armies of security-holders in the East — The ideal- 
ism of investors—=Investors and the rule of the 
people — The board-room view — Investor sentiment a 
lid on Eastern popular discontent — Insurgency of the 
Middle West— Routes of democratic advance — Pro- 
visions for enlightening the voter— What the people 
will do with their new power— Will people-rule 
spread to the Hast? 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER X 
PAGE 
THE MippLE WEST— STATE UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR 
RE RTCER TE Mice Gch! SD Lay, poet | ae te Ge (ee) Sr AST 


Comparative growth of higher education East and West 
— Motives for building up the state universities — The 
avalanche of students— The commonwealth college 
as alma mater —Its utilitarian atmosphere —Its coedu- 
cation— Its relation to the church colleges — Uni- 
versity financing — Beneficent social changes wrought 
by the college-bred— The university in the service 
of we state — The university in the service of the 
people. 


CHAPTER XI 


THE MIDDLE WEST— SOCIETY AND CULTURE... . 212 


The pleasant fruits of Eastern leisure— Manners East 
and West — Why the Sybarites leave the Middle West 
— Why the rich Goths leave— What manner of so- 
ciety they create in their capitals — The democratic 
spirit of Western society — Attitude toward the social 
problem — Culture Hast and West — The newspapers 
of the two sections — Hasy intellectual standards of the 
West —Its passion for bigness— Migration of the 
talents to the Atlantic Slope — Future relations of the 
Middle West and the East. 





PREFACE 


The average man’s mental picture of his so- 
ciety is at least two or three decades out of 
date, so that half the time he is fighting wind- 
mills instead of grappling with the enemies that 
rise in his path. In this book I aim to bring 
the picture nearer to reality by describing cer- 
tain contemporary social developments. This 
is, to be sure, a hazardous undertaking and 
very likely I have misread some of the tenden- 
cies I perceive. The interpreter of the present 
ventures oftener on slippery places than the in- 
terpreter of the past; but then he may be more 
useful. 

For it is only wing tendencies that man can 
work with, curb, or guide. 

EDWARD ALSWORTH Ross. 


FOREWORD 


“ Women in Industry ” is the stenographic re- 
port of an address given in 1909. ‘ Commercial- 
ism Rampant” is an address prepared in 1908. 
Since then the situation has decidedly improved, 
especially the attitude of the church toward com- 
mercial evils, but I have thought it best to print 
it in its original form. To the publishers of 
Everybody’s Magazine I am indebted for permis- 
sion to republish “ The Outlook for Plain Folk ”; 
to the publishers of Hearst’s Magazine for per- 
mission to print “ The World-Wide Advance of 
Democracy ”’; and to the publishers of the Atlan- 
tic Monthly for permission to reproduce ‘“ The 
Suppression of Important News.” “The Sig- 
nificance of Increasing Divorce” and the “ Mid- 

dle West ” series have appeared in The Century. 
| E. A. R. 





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CHANGING AMERICA 
I 


HE movement toward democracy is world- . 
wide and tidal. It has gone on for a cen- 
tury and a quarter, and invaded every home of 
white men. Even seventy-odd years ago Sydney 
Smith could liken its opponents to Dame Part- 
ington trying to sweep back the Atlantic with a 
broom. It may be dammed for a decade; for a 
lifetime, never. Universal suffrage, confesses a 
critic, “has the majesty of doom.” Race is no 
barrier to it. Yesterday it was English, or 
Danes, or Germans that made the great stride 
forward. To-day it is Japanese, Persians, Turks. 
To-morrow it may be Hindoos, or Chinese, or 
Burmans. Even the “ changeless East” thrills 
with the electric impulse, and presently for a 
sample of “ Oriental” government we shall need 
to look to Zanzibar or Borneo. 
Universal and irresistible as it is, this rise of 
the peoples is no mysterious fiat of Destiny. It 
3 


CHANGING AMERICA 


is the outworking of certain causes. The causes 
being there, the thing had to come. We look for 
the democratic trend to continue, only because 
the forces that have made for democracy persist, 
and are being aided by new forces. ‘To be sure, 
we can see only to the crest of the next ridge. Is 
there a Valley of Shadow beyond? Who knows? 
The conjunctions of to-morrow may conspire to 
bring on an eclipse of the common man. But 
the future of the undistinguished many, so far 
as we can peer into it, is brighter than the past. 
Socially, democracy insists that the grading of 
folks on the basis of birth or rank or calling or 
cash is coarse and barbaric. It does not deny 
that_ men are as gold, silver, and copper in rela- 


tive worth. But it wants men rated, not by place 
or trappings, but by essential things — wisdom, 
character, efficiency. The application of these 
standards always humbles the exalted few, and 
gives more dignity and consideration to the busy 
people who make the world go round. 
‘Politically, democracy means the sovereignty, 
not of the average man — who is a rather nar- 
row, short-sighted, muddle-headed creature — but 
of a matured public opinion, a very different 
thing. “ ne vote” does not e 
4 


THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK 


Sambo equal to Socrates in the state, for the bal- 
loting but registers a public opinion. In the 
forming of this opinion the sage has a million 
times the weight of the field hand. With modern — 
facilities for mind influencing mind, democracy, 
at its best, substitutes the direction of the recog- 
nized_moral and intellectual élite for the rule of 
the strong, the rich, or the privileged. 


The general causes of democracy are apt to be 
overlooked by Americans, because so much of 
our own democracy roots in a single unique con- 
dition, namely, access to free land. Think of the 
bracing and equalizing influence of the gratuitous 
distribution of a vast public domain to actual set- 
tlers! Is it any wonder the spirit of equality 
grew up out of recurrent frontier conditions and 
Spread eastward? But now, alas, free land is 
gone, and henceforth our fate will be that of 
transatlantic societies. If men are cheapening 
there, they will cheapen here. If the people win 
here, it will be for the same reasons that they 
win in Switzerland or Finland. 

What are these reasons? 

One is that light is flooding the social deeps. 
In 1800, the average inhabitant of the United 
States had had eighty-two days of schooling. 

5 


CHANGING AMERICA 


Alexander Hamilton had this sort in mind when 
he brought his fist down on the table and shouted, 
“The people, sir, the people is a great beast!” 
So did Roger Sherman when he said, “‘ The people 
immediately should have as little to do as may 
be about government.” So did Elbridge 
Gerry when he declared democracy to be the 
worst of all political evils. So did John Adams 
when he demanded a separate representation for 
“the rich and the well-born.” Hence they joined 
to interpose an electoral college between the peo- 
ple and the presidency, and the legislatures be- 
tween the people and the Senate. In 1900, the 
average American had had 1,046 days of school- 
ing — more than twelve times as much as his 
great-grandfather — yet Hamilton’s sneer is still 
flung at him, and he is held unfit to choose a 
United States senator or pass upon an act of 
his legislature! 


The fact is, the common people are no longer 
“masses,” nor do they behave like mobs. They 
have broken up into individuals. There is no 


real likeness between a deliberate referendum 

vote in sparsely settled Oregon and the offhand, 

tumultuous decision of six thousand Athenians 

met in their agora. Heavy Tories dub this “ the 
6 


THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK 


era of crowds”; but that is just what it is not. 
For crowds and mental epidemics go to the Mid- 
dle Ages, to Russia, to the Orient. Ours is the 
era of publics. Between the rule of the mob and 
the sovereignty of public opinion there is all the 
difference in the world, for the one enthrones 
the worst selves of the people, the other their best 
selves. Nevertheless, privilege screams the old 
taunts, and hurls at the pondered public opin- 
ion of to-day the worn epithets of the crowd psy- 
chologists —“ hysteria,’ “frenzy,” ‘“ delusion,” 
“ fanaticism,” ‘‘ clamor,” and ‘“ impulse.” 





SOAP AND DEMOCRACY 


Soap and water are befriending democracy. 
Of the personal habits of the masses down to 
the middle of the last century, the less said the 
better. The followers of Jack Cade and Rienzi 
were, literally, “the Great Unwashed.” A 
gentleman had some excuse for crying “ Faugh!”’ 
and holding his civet-scented handkerchief to his 
nose. The common people lost quickly the re- 
spect of those of their number who had won 
through to cleanliness and refinement. ‘ Good 
breeding ” referred to baths rather than to man- 
ners. When, sixty years ago, street-cars were 

" ; 


CHANGING AMERICA 


introduced, it was predicted that no gentleman 
could endure to ride in them. 

How is it now? ‘The street-car is so popular 
with all classes that the cab can hardly find a 
foothold. Besides the triumphant progress of 
the private bath-tub — thanks to cheap city water 
— the cities have been installing municipal baths. 
Last year thirty-four American cities supplied 
more than eighteen million free baths. And the 
movement is in its infancy, if we consider what 
England and Germany are doing. The effect will 
be narrowing of the esthetic space between those 
with social position and those without. Class 
distinctions will count for less when they turn 
merely on whether you have an automobile, or 
keep a servant, or dress for dinner. 


NON-PARTIZAN RELIGION 


On the walls of old Roumanian churches are 
to be seen frescos of the Last Judgment, in which 
kings, nobles, and bishops are being led off to 
hell, while St. Peter welcomes a throng of peas- 
ants to paradise. This consoling prospect of 
redress was a soporific that kept the people quiet 
while they were shorn. The earlier prayer-book 
of the English Church defines “ duty toward my 

8 


THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK 


neighbor” as including “to order myself lowly 
and reverently to all my betters.” No wonder 
the titled rake surmised, ‘“ God will think twice 
before he damns a person of quality!” To-day, 
through his twenty thousand village “ popes,” 
the Czar can drug his peasants with the story 
that the St. Petersburg massacre was worked up 
by Japanese spies. Without the enlivening prick 
of competition, a centralized ecclesiastical ma- 
chine at last betrays the people to the Powers 
that Be. The religion a hierarchy ladles out to 
its dupes is chloroform. How cheering, then, is 
the fact that many Western peoples have already 
escaped the grip of centralized churches, and 
that there is no prospect of their ever again fall- 
ing under priestly dictation. In all the forenoon 
lands, the end of clericalism is in sight. Relli- 
gion, of course, will live, but not as a prop to the 
authority of a dominating class. 

That scarcity enhances value is as true of hu- 
man beings as it is of fancy stock or fast horses. 
Now, there are signs that folks will soon cease 
to be a glut in the market. In what time a babe 
grows to manhood, the birth-rate of Italy has 
fallen a tenth, of Hungary an eighth, of Germany 
and Holland a seventh, of France and Scotland 

9 


CHANGING AMERICA 


a sixth, of England a fifth. But not from hard 
times, mark you. For why should the baby crop 
of Australasia have shrunk a third? Why 
should the proportion of children among Ameri- 
cans have fallen a quarter in forty years? No 
symptom of pressure, this, but of release — re- 
lease of women from the home “ sphere,” of wives 
from the yoke of husbands, of married couples 
from the injunction to “ increase and multiply.” 
The unlooked-for promptness with which the mil- 
lions have developed a sense of responsibility in 
this matter of family bids us hope for a Golden 
Age when the specter of overpopulation will be 
laid forever. 

Tell a Celestial gentleman of a myriad of 
Chinese wiped out by plague or flood, and you get 
the bland comment, “ Plenty Chinamen left!” 
Such contempt is natural wherever overbreeding 
has cheapened humanity. In the teeming Orient 
common people seem as little considered as clay 
pigeons at the shooting traps. Being a grass- 
hopper in the eyes of others, the individual ends 
by being a grasshopper in his own eyes. Hence, 
in the East, pessimistic religion, crouching obe- 
dience to rulers, wifely submission, subordina- 
tion of self to family or community, frivolous sui- 

ako 


a 


THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK 


cide, meager philanthropy. The West, on the 
other hand, is already the region of dear men; 
with a slackening output of babies, human beings 
will become still dearer. The Black Death, by 
Sweeping away a third of the English people in 
the fourteenth century, so enhanced a man’s 
worth that serfdom came to an end. On the 
Same principle, a lighter birth-rate will give the 
common people not only more economic value, 
but also more social and political value. 


THE PROMISE OF LEISURE 


The let-up in the struggle for food and the 
springing up of a population of iron slaves — 
the machines — to do man’s bidding, hold out the 
promise of a broader margin of leisure for all. 
Few realize how much the political nullity of the 
masses has been due to their intense preoccupa- 
tion with the stern task of earning a living. Of 
necessity, they have been too engrossed with their 
‘work to lift their eyes to the common weal. But 
who can doubt that, ere long, all elements in 
society will have time to read, to think, to con- 
sult together, to organize? This cannot but 
make them abler to win and to retain political 
power. Popular intelligence has always proven 

11 


CHANGING AMERICA 


an embarrassment to ruling classes, and they 
throw what obstacles they can in the way of it. 
Moreover, it takes leisure, and well-employed lei- 
sure, to fit the plain people successfully to take 
part in government. The appalling crudeness 
of their ideas has again and again defeated well- 
meant attempts to give a larger share of control 
to the workers. Unless such have a margin of 
free time, the words of Jesus ben Sirach are as 
true to-day as when they were written: 


“The wisdom of the scribe cometh by opportunity of leisure ; 

And he that hath little business shall become wise. 

How shall be become wise that holdeth the plow, 

That glorieth in the shaft of the goad, 

That driveth oxen, and is occupied with their labors, 

And whose discourse is of the stock of bulls? 

He will set his heart upon turning his furrows; 

And his wakefulness is to give his heifers their fodder. 

So is every artificer and workmaster 

So is the smith sitting by the anvil 

So is the potter sitting at his work 

All these put their trust in their hands; 

And each becometh wise in his own work. 

They shall not be sought for in the council of the peo- 
AG ele hoa ora 


y The coming rule of the functional people will 
therefore be warranted, not by their present wis- 


* Heclesiasticus, xxxviii. The passage is too long to quote 
in full, 


12 


THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK 


dom, but by the intelligence they are likely to 
acquire when they have conquered for themselves 
a fair share of the leisure made possible by man’s 
new mastery of the forces of nature. ; 

Science is helping, in its way, to break down 
the claim of a particular class to act for the rest. 
A century ago a German apologist for aristocracy 
made the point that peasant and noble are not 
at all the same in bodily organization. They look 
alike, but a chemical examination would show 
an immense difference between them. The clod- 
hopper is merely a lump of organized potato, 
able to move itself and assimilate more potato. 
But the noble is made out of delicate viands — 
pheasants, truffles, and the like. In nerve and 
brain, therefore, prince and commoner are of dif- 
ferent clay. 

To-day Science scoffs at such a foundation for 
caste. 


THE FETISH OF HEREDITY 


So is it with the notion of heredity to which 
a_privileged class appeals. Aristocracy predi- 
cates its superiority on the theory that the 
founder of a line hands down his capacity un- 
diminished to his descendants. Biology shows 

13 


CHANGING AMERICA 


that this original surplus of brains is by mar- 
riage halved in each generation; that extraor- 
dinary ability cannot be transmitted far, because 
the older race-heredity keeps pulling one’s de- 
scendants down toward the race mean; that 
among the privileged the fools and weaklings 
are not winnowed out, as they are among plain 
people, but propagate their kind unhindered. 

Still, for all it pricks certain pink balloons 
of pretension, let us own frankly that Science can 
be twisted to the support of plutocratic arro- 
gance. Darwinism strips the common-place man 
of the dignity that attached to him as a son of 
God and, moreover, gives the successful a chance 
to parade themselves as the fittest. 

Art has been getting nearer the people. The 
poet or playwright no longer eats out of a royal 
or ducal hand. The painter is not a courtier, 
like Rubens or Lely. Artists are finding inspira- 
tion in the pathos, fidelity, or courage of peas- 
ants, fishermen, miners, or iron-workers. After 
Millet, Israels, Meunier, Repin, and Vereshtcha- 
gin, painters will hardly be content to take their 
themes from the pageant, the ball-room, or the 
fox-hunt. After Hugo, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Haupt- 
mann, and Hardy, imaginative writers are not 

14 


THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK 


likely to accept the feudal stigma on labor, nor 
to echo the sneer of Renan: “ The masses do not 
count, are a mere bulk of raw material out of 
which, drop by drop, the essence is extracted.” 

The needs of discipline make army and navy 
hotbeds of caste feeling, of contempt for the civil, 
or at least for the industrial, population. In 
view of the Juggernaut of European militarism, 
we Americans ought to be thankful that we 
should have to multiply our navy by seven to 
make it bulk among us as the navy bulks in Great 
Britain. In Germany, one man in thirty is in 
barracks, being drilled into deference and obed- 
ience; in the United States, one man in three 
hundred. ‘We should need to multiply our army 
by ten to have overbearing officers knocking their 
men about and running civilians through with 
their swords, as in Germany. 

The newspaper cartoon is a democrat. Some 
day the inventor of it will rank with Gutenberg, 
for in enlightening the people on public affairs 
it is to red ink and capitals what the arc-light is 
to the tallow dip. Give it much of the credit 
for the growing failure of the bosses to hoodwink 
the voters. It is like the Greek fire that saved 
civilization from the Turks. Lie? Of course 

15 


CHANGING AMERICA 


the political machine, too, can launch its car- 
toons, but a false cartoon is like a wet rocket. 
It does not go off. 

Some, I know, will pooh-pooh my showing. 
“You are behind the times,” I hear them say. 
“* Actually the trend is all the other way. How 
about the rule of Big Business in American cities 
and states? Have not special interests, working 
through party machines, made self-government a 
fiction? And if democracy has become a sham 
in the house of its guardians, what hope is there 
for it elsewhere? 

No. What has been lost is not democracy, but 
certain fruits of democracy. The interests have 
their way only because they work in the dark — 
always in the dark. They contrive to fool 
enough of the people enough of the time. There 
is robbery by the mailed fist, and robbery by the 
lithe hand. The feudal classes spoiled the peo- 
ple like a Front de Boeuf, the corporations to- 
day filch from us like Fagin. The plain people 
here are not weak, as they are in Russia, in India, 
in South America. They are strong, but they 
have not been taking notice — that is all. They 
have been too sure, too careless, too trusting. 
But it will not take generations of slow upbuild- 

16 


THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK 


ing to put the people again at the helm. Ring 
the tocsin a few years, and we shall see who is 
master. 

Is it, then, all plain sailing for the common 
people? 

In this country the thronging in from the 


oe ward, Sone aad lands Pan none 





Their habits cause Americans to shrink from 
them. as from a lower caste. Their helplessness 
invites oppression. Certain official brutalities 
peculiar to us — white peonage, police clubbing, 
the “ sweat-box,” the “ third degree,” the convict- 
lease system — got their start in the abuse of the 
friendless alien. Their wage-cutting, “‘ scabbing,” 
and strike-breaking foment violence, which 
leads to the ready bayonet, state constabularies, 
and the denial of home rule to cities. Their po- 
litical crudeness brings reproach on democratic 
institutions. Their clannishness delivers them 
to the shrewd boss who gives them “ representa- 
tion ” on his ticket. Finally, our increasing di- 
versity in blood and tradition, by permitting race 
prejudice to be played upon, divides and weakens 
the people in their fight for self-government. 
Nor is this all. 
1% 


CHANGING AMERICA 


The startling inequalities of wealth that have 
sprung up in a generation threaten to establish 
class distinctions hostile to democracy. For the 
tendency of such abysmal contrasts is thus: The 
ultra-rich vie in extravagance. The spectacle of 
their baronial estates, princely houses, liveried 
lackeys, Sybaritic luxury, and elaborate ostenta- 
tion infects even the worthy with the worship of 
wealth. Success comes to be measured by the 
sheer cash standard. The young and ambitious 
realize it, and shape their course accordingly. 
People fall apart into as many social groups as 
there are styles of living, and forget how to meet 
their fellows on the level. The rule is, snobbish- 
ness toward those below you, and toadyism 
toward those above you. The rich are gan- 
grened with pride, the poor with envy. There is 
no longer a public opinion, there are only clash- 
ing class opinions. Honest labor is felt to be 
more disgraceful than mean parasitism. The 
toiling millions cease to be respected, even by 
themselves. The upper classes claim and are 
conceded the right to lead, finally the right to 
govern. 

Such would be the course of the malady. Un- 
less democracy mends the distribution of wealth, 

18 


THE OUTLOOK FOR PLAIN FOLK 


the mal-distribution of wealth will end democ- 
racy. : 

And yet — summing up — the balance inclines 
in favor of democracy. The forces on its side 
reach deeper; they are civilizational. The 
swarming in of low-grade immigrants and the 
mal-distribution of wealth are manageable things. 
They can be, in fact elsewhere have been, success- 
fully dealt with by organized society. They are 
matters for statesmanship. So it is more likely 
that democracy will cut the roots of privilege 
than that privilege will cut the roots of democ- 
racy. 

Let the half-stifled muck-raker, the faltering 
soldier of the common good, the down-hearted re- 
former leave his trench for a moment and climb 
to the hilltop that looks out on all the peoples 
and on all the forces of the age. 

He will see that “the lips of the morning are 
reddening!” 


19 


I] 
THE WORLD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY 


HIRTY odd years ago when the Shah, of 

Persia was in Berlin as guest of the Ger- 
man Kaiser, a special musical program was given 
at Kroll’s Theater for the pleasure of the East- 
ern potentate. At the close the Shah was asked 
if there was any number he would like to have 
repeated. Yes, would the orchestra please re- 
peat the first number? They played it, but he 
was dissatisfied; the piece that had caught his 
fancy was the one before that. Finally it be- 
came clear that what he wanted to hear again 
was the musicians tuning up their instruments. 
After His Majesty and suite had vacated the 
royal palace provided for their stay, the splen- 
did apartments were found to be in horrible con- 
dition; for every morning the sun-worshipers had 
sacrificed goats in the tapestried audience hall! 
The other day from the land of this barbarian 
ruler came the cry of the Persian Majliss or as- 

20 


WORLD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY 


sembly to the American Congress appealing for 
its support for maintaining popular government 
in Persia. 

Within six years we have seen the creation of 
parliaments in Turkey, Russia, Persia and China, 
the birth of a republic in Portugal and in China, 
the overthrow of “ Diaz-potism ” in Mexico, the 
startling spread of. unrest in India and the 
growth of political socialism in all Western 
countries. Wherefore this stirring of Demos in 
many lands? There is no central fire that breaks 
out in volcanic eruption, now here, now there, 
for between Portugal and Asia, between the Far 
East and the Near East there is no secret co- 
operation. The peoples are restless because the 
world over certain universal causes are under- 
mining arbitrary and anti-social government. 


THE WHITE MAN’S OBJECT-LESSONS 


As the pushing white man plants his settle- 
ments here and there over the globe, he furnishes 
other races impressive object lessons, in good 
government. Sixty years ago Hong-Kong was a 
barren rock infested by pirates. Now it har- 
bors a third of a million Chinese under the 
union jack and the number is ever swelling. 

21 


CHANGING AMERICA 


Recently the Colony provided for the countless 
junks and sampans that line the shore a 
“typhoon refuge” where, in case the little 
house-boat swamps, John and his family will 
find themselves in water of wading depth. At 
great cost the government has lined all the 
ravines and gullies that lace the mountain side 
with cement drains, so that not a hoof-printful 
of rainwater shall stand breeding the pestilent 
mosquito. At street corners boxes are placed to 
receive dead rats, for the rat is the bearer of the 
bubonic plague. In a Single year sixty thousand 
dead rats were collected and examined and three 
hundred yielded evidences which subjected the 
wards from which they came to plague meas- 
ures. Imagine how the streams of Celestials cir- 
culating between Hong-Kong and the mainland 
spread the knowledge of what a civilized govern- 
ment does for its people! At Shanghai and 
Tientsin, veritable fairylands to the Chinese, 
they cannot but contrast the throngs of rick- 
shas, dog-carts, broughams and motor cars that 
pour endlessly through the spotless asphalt 
streets with the narrow, crooked, filthy, noisome 
Streets of the native city, to be traversed only 
afoot or in sedan chair. Even the young man- 
22 


WORLD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY 


darin, buried alive in some dingy walled town 
of the far interior, without news, events, or So- 
ciety, recalls with longing the lights, the gor- 
geous tea houses and the alluring “sing song ’”’ 
girls of Foochow Road and curses the stupid 
policy that penalizes every enterprising China- 
man who tries to “ start something ” for the ben- 
efit of the community. At Kiaouchou the Ger- 
mans with their handsome streets, quays, docks, 
schools, parks and reforested hillsides are giving 
an object lesson to the intelligent Chinese. 


HEALTHY GOVERNMENT IS “ CATCHING ”’ 


Foreign residence or travel is another thing 
that converts the Asiatic to the Western idea of 
government for the people. Mournfully he con- 
trasts the wonderful bustle, riches and power of 
the self-governing countries with the sloth, pov- 
erty and weakness of his own country. The 
“Young Turk” movement started with Turks 
who knew the West and was at first directed 
from Paris. Wherever Chinese wander —- 
Singapore, Borneo, Indo-China, Java, the Philip- 
pines —they find a better government than 
China has ever known. In the Malay States 
there are thirty Chinese millionaires, yet until 

Ro 








CHANGING AMERICA’ 


lately not one of these dared return to his native 
province lest the mandarin, in the name of an 
old law which forbids the subjects of the Son of 
Heaven to leave the realm without permission, 
should lay him by the heels and wring his wealth 
out of him. Can we wonder that the ten mil- 
lions of Chinese prospering outside of China are 
enthusiastic supporters of the Chinese Revolu- 
tion? 
In spite of their discreet avoidance of political 
meddling, the missionary educators have been 
mining the foundations of the Asiatic state. In 
Robert’s College and Beirut College the son of 
the muleteer as well as the son of the pasha 
learned of a kind of government that allows free 
speech, free press, free movement, free assem- 
blage and equality of all before the law. In the 
fourteen Protestant mission colleges planted 
about China the sons of peasants and of gentry 
became acquainted with Western discussions on 
liberty, equality and the responsibilities of rulers 
to the people. In certain of these colleges all 
the finer lads soon joined the secret societies that 
were striving to get the Manchu “ old-man-of-the- 
sea” off the back of the Chinese. 

As translator, too, the missionary has been an 

24 


WORLD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY 


innocent abettor of revolution. He not only did 
the Bible into the Oriental tongues, but also the 
masterpieces of Western thought, including 
treatises on political science. Thus the intelli- 
gent natives have learned of the blessings we ex- 
pect from government, of our notion that the 
rulers are the servants, not the masters of the 
people. They become fascinated by the vision 
and read on and on till their minds are com- 
pletely alienated from Oriental ideas. Only 
when there is a crack in governmental authority 
and the red-hot lava rushes up through it, can 
we appreciate the heat and stress of the minds 
that have undergone this conversion. 

The native newspaper press is the chief dis- 
Seminator of new ideas among the common peo- 
ple. Within a few weeks after the upheaval in 
Constantinople, over two hundred new papers 
had appeared. The peoples of Turkey have de- 
veloped a great interest in public happenings 
and their consumption of newspapers contin- 
ually rises. In China the last decade has seen 
the growth of a native press believed to include 
not less than four hundred sheets. In the vil- 
lages a number of poor men club together and 
subscribe for some paper published from the safe 

25 


CHANGING AMERICA 


shelter of a foreign concession. It is understood 
in what order they shall read it and by the time 
the copy reaches subscriber number 5, it is worn 
to a rag. Among the illiterates the new ideas 
are spread by means of clever cartoons. 


REALITIES OF ORIENTAL GOVERNMENT 


Light always converts the Oriental into an in- 
surgent because governments of the classic 
Asiatic type cannot stand comparison. Through 
their crude taxing methods they torment the peo- 
ple needlessly, like a clumsy sheep shearer who 
cannot remove the fleece without taking skin as 
well as wool. They fail to afford security, the 
sine qua non of thrift and enterprise. ‘“ Never 
will I invest a penny of my money outside the 
zone of foreign protection,” Wu Ting Fang once 
told me. Oriental governments bleed new in- 
dustries instead of encouraging them. Failing 
to separate the judicial from the executive, their 
courts are courts of injustice. The claim of the 
crown to all hidden wealth discourages the min- 
ing of the precious metals. Highways are not 
provided and public works are neglected. In 
consequence enterprises stifle, the people do not 
develop their capacities, and inevitably the bulk 

26 


WORLD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY 


of them remain ignorant, superstitious, ap- 
athetiec and poor. 

In a recent book the Empress Dowager’s first 
lady-in-waiting tells how among the Empress’s 
New Year’s presents were four bags of perfectly 
matched pearls from the Viceroy of Canton. 
Her Majesty, however, had already such stores 
of pearls that she took no notice of the splendid 
gift beyond remarking that they were “ very 
nice.’ The Viceroy of Chili sent a cloak so 
overlaid with precious stones that Her Majesty 
found it “too heavy” and never wore it but 
once. Other viceroys sent like gifts, for each 
must keep himself in favor at Peking. In view 
of the squandering of peasant money on costly 
gewgaws for the court and on the pensions of a 
million Manchus, one cannot be surprised at the 
blood-curdling slogan, ‘‘ Fellow countrymen, the 
Manchu has eaten our flesh long enough; hence- 
forth we intend to sleep in his skin! ” 

The common characteristic of governments 
free from any form of popular control is that 
they take much and return little. Saving an oc- 
casional Alfred, or Frederick the Great, or 
Joseph the Second, no government serves the 
people unless it has to. The irresponsible rulers 

rat 


CHANGING AMERICA 


either exact more or do less than popular govern- 
ments — usually both. In an “ Oriental ” coun- 
try four-fifths of the services we expect from gov- 
ernments are unknown. Roads, street cleaning, 
fire fighting, sanitation, patents, forestry, agri- 
cultural experiment, education and care of the 
poor are not recognized as duties of the official. 
Naturally, then, when Orientals learn of the 
tender and considerate revenue systems of the 
West, when they hear of the benefits showered 
upon the citizen, when they contrast the hard- 
working, business-like official on a fixed salary 
with the cormorant pashas and mandarins, they 
feel just as we should feel under such circum- 
stances; for human nature resents giving some- 
thing for nothing. 

Recent developments make it clear that the in- 
teraction between East and West is to produce, 
not compromise, but a complete acceptance of 
Western fundamental institutions by the Orient. 
It does not appear that the Asiatics balk at our 
political and social arrangements any more than 
they reject our surgery, telephones, or tramcars. 
In other words, the willed elements in our civ- 
ilization — not its noxious by-products —are 
congenial to human nature and therefore of uni- 

28 


WORLD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY 


versal validity. It appears that the Turk hates 
espionage, arbitrary arrest, the passport system, 
the “ baksheesh ” plan and other practices of ab- 
solutism. He enjoys inviolability of domicile, 
sacredness of private correspondence, freedom 
from illegal arrest, liberty of assemblage, of 
speech and of the press. The Chinaman hates 
“ squeeze,” official sloth and the waste of public 
money; he likes roads, police, schools, and a uni- 
form currency. 


FROM SWORD TO SHEKEL 


Whenever the hated absolute government falls 
before a united people, all expect the event to 
usher in the Golden Age. In the Turkish “ feast 
of liberty ” there was a fraternization like that 
of the French at the Festival of the Constitution 
in 1790. Christian and Turk, Moslem and Jew, 
Kurd and Armenian, priest and layman, official 
and citizen, fell into one another’s arms and 
kissed. But this spirit of brotherhood does not 
last long. Usually, the propertied middle class 
gains most, while the dependent classes may be 
worse off after the change. In Japan the new 
industrialism is working out its inevitable re- 
sults in overwork, long hours, underpay, child 

29 


CHANGING AMERICA 


labor and female labor. Yet the cotton and silk 
lords from Osaka and Kyoto, sitting in Parlia- 
ment, defeat every attempt of a paternal govern- 
ment to pass factory laws. The parliamentary 
régime at first seats certain classes in the sad- 
dle and the attainment of genuine democracy in 
any Oriental country will call for many strug- 
gles and sacrifices. Nevertheless, a society in 
which only two-thirds are skinned is better off 
than a society in which nine out of ten are flayed. 
The rule of the shekel is milder than the double 
despotism of shekel and sword. 


THE DEMOCRACY OF SOCIALISM 


The advance of socialism in Western countries 
is simply the later phase of the world wide drift 
toward democracy. Although possessed of the 
ballot, the working class has so far done little for 
itself because laborers have persisted in accept- 
ing and acting on the economic philosophy of 
their employers. But now there exists a full- 
fledged, working class philosophy — with press, 
literature, program and propaganda — which is 
dignified by the support of scholars, scientists, 
artists, prelates, publicists, journalists and 
statesmen. This philosophy calls black that 

30 


WORLD WIDE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY 


which the reigning business-class philosophy 
calls white, and calls white that which the other 
calls black. It declares that the workers, not 
the idlers, are the cornerstone of society and in- 
sists that the first thing to be considered is liveli- 
hoods, not profits. ‘However biased and wrong- 
headed this economic philosophy may be, it does 
give the working man courage to take a line of 
his own and develop his own attitude toward the 
Social system the possessing class have framed. 
Through his own organs and orators he learns 
of damning facts once kept from him and becomes 
critical, self-assertive and demanding. The 
spread of socialism, then, is but the latest phase 
of the universal tendency for the people to 
endeavor to control government for their own 
benefit. 


31 


Til 
THE FALLING BIRTH-RATD 


CENTURY ago Malthus startled the world 

by demonstrating that our race naturally 
multiplies faster than it can increase its food 
supply, with the result that population tends 
ever to press painfully upon the means of sub- 
sistence. So long as mankind reproduces freely, 
numbers can be adjusted to resources only by the 
grinding of destructive agencies, such as war, 
famine, poverty and disease. To be sure, this 
ghastly train of ills may be escaped if only peo- 
ple will prudently postpone marriage. Since, 
however, late marriage calls for the exercise of 
more foresight and self-control than can be 
looked for in the masses, Malthus painted the fu- 
ture of humanity with a somberness that gave 
political. economy its early nickname of “the 
dismal science.” | 
Malthus is not in the least “refuted ” by the 
fact that, during his century, the inhabitants of 

32 


THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE 


Europe leaped in number from one hundred and 
eighty-seven millions to four hundred millions, 
with no increase but rather a diminution of 
misery. It is true, unprecedented successes in 
augmenting the food supply have staved off the 
overpopulation danger. Within a life time, not 
only have the arts of food raising made giant 
strides, but, at the world’s rim, great virgin 
tracts have been brought under the plow, while 
steam hurries to the larders of the Old World 
their surplus produce. But such a bounty of 
the gods is not rashly to be capitalized. While 
there is no limit to be set to the progress of 
scientific agriculture, no one can show where 
our century is to find its Mississippi Valley, 
Argentina, Canada, or New Zealand to fill with 
herds or farms. The vaunted plenty of our time 
adjourns but does not dispel the haunting vision 
of a starving race on a crowded planet. 


THE RACE-WIDE DECLINED IN THE BIRTH-RATE 


Nevertheless, the clouds that hung low about 
the future are breaking. The terrible Malthus 
failed to anticipate certain influences which in 
Some places have already so far checked multi- 
plication as to ameliorate the lot of even the 

By) 


CHANGING AMERICA 


lower and broader social layers. The sagging 
of the national birth-rate made its first appear- 
ance about fifty years ago in France, thereby giv- 
ing the other peoples a chance to thank God 
they were not as these decadent French. But 
the thing has become so general that to-day no 
people dares to point the finger of scorn. In 
1878, after the notorious trial of the “ Neo-Mal- 
thusians,” Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant, for cir- 
culating “ The Fruits of Philosophy,” the fall of 
the birth-rate began in England. During the 
eighties, it invaded Belgium, Holland and 
Switzerland. In 1889 it seized with great viru- 
lence upon Australia, again as sequel to a law 
case. Just before the close of the century Fin- 
land, Italy and Hungary fell into line. In Ger- 
many and Austria it is only within four or five 
years that the economists have begun to discuss 
“our diminishing fecundity.” In all Christen- 
dom, only Russia, the Balkan states and French 
Canada show the old-fashioned birth-rates of 
forty, fifty or even fifty-five, per thousand. 

If for each nation we compare the average 
birth-rate of 1903-5, with that of 1876-80, the per 
cent. of decline is as follows: — 


34 


THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE 


New Zealand .........«. Ban ACTA sacs ee We cakes « Lif 
New South Wales ...... PRUNE WEY. cra cela ventc elena ear 16 
TIRE ed co's 0 oc0, © 60's Dee MS WOUCTLY foe aid web ecicw aes 15 
7 UCU ie SA Se a oe 21 Swiizerlandi) ties. he te 13 
PMP Gis ob 85's v0.0 BLP A USUL LS Weis ore eh aree Cee 12 
MRCP es tide sv © os 0's ccs PARR ECAIVE RS oac.s aihva 2 ae earns 12 
err MIRC ete he ccd di aca die 4 « ES bs LICHYOA EE Aes Pies aaeaevare cm 
Uso Tse ie Neg Ae LTC IA MICL 9 aie Wass Weare acini ce 9 


The tendency in the United States is best re- 
vealed in the diminishing number of children un- 
der five years to each thousand women of child- 
bearing age. The decline from 1860 to 1890 is 
24 per cent. 


SER TOG as arvteli te’ WG eA ee of cis Wie. aleve ea oe 626 
PE COMNY, c.chp sae WighaiW.e Sicialy vale oa Wasik 634. 
PERE MEA 1S) a acs Stara Sh ie. f e¥a a4 Sone wise <i 572 
DAE ME es cain 0 Ss lle whe ale] wicha: @ ay, Seine ive 559 
MAMET I Stele i’ clan's n° Ak 04,4 ore 20 alan ede 485 
MR RMR Eee Wier ae! aaa ova veh Wier ere oy'< a = Atat 479 


As the bulk of our recent immigration comes 
from the more prolific European peoples, certain 
New England states which are rapidly filling 
with aliens show a slight rise in fecundity. If, 
however, the contribution of the native women be 
Separated from that of the foreign born women, 
it appears that the old American stock there is 
dying out. | 

35 


CHANGING AMERICA 


THE DEATH-RATE FALLS FASTER THAN THE 
BIRTH-RATE 


Owing to the fact that the death rate has been 
falling even faster than the birth rate, there is, 
so far, no slackening in the growth of numbers. 
Indeed, part of the fall in the birth rate merely 
reflects the increasing proportion of aged. But 
it is certain that human life cannot be prolonged 
indefinitely, while there is no telling how far the 
aversion to large families may go. We may, 
therefore, count on a marked retardation in the 
growth of the Western peoples within our life- 
time. 7 


THE NEW MORTALITY MORE CONTAGIOUS THAN 
THE NEW FECUNDITY 


The forces reducing the death-rate are by no 
means the same as those cutting down the birth- 
rate, nor have they the same sphere of operation. 
Deaths are fewer because of advances in medi- 
cine, better medical education, public hospitals, 
pure water supply, milk inspection, housing re- 
form and sanitation. Births are rarer owing to 
enlightenment, the ascent of women and individ- 
ualistic democracy. The former may be intro- 

36 


THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE 


duced quickly, from above. The latter await the 
slow action of the school, the press, the ballot, 
the loosening of custom. 

For this reason, where a backward folk is 
brought under efficient modern administration, 
the proportion of deaths may be rapidly reduced 
even though the people continue to breed in the 
old reckless way. This is why in Russia and 
India, with their amazing birth-rate of 49 per 
thousand (New Jersey and Michigan have 
18.5!), Science saves lives from disease only to 
lose them to famine. Here, then, is a factor 
which threatens to rupture the military and po- 
litical equilibrium between French and Ger- 
mans, between Germans and Slavs, between 
Europeans and Asiatics, between the white race _ 
and the yellow and brown races. Jf ever il 
China flames out into a Yellow Peril it will be. 
in that momentous interval between her laying | 
down drains and her quitting ancestor worship. | 


FALSE INTERPRETATION 


An abrupt fall in the birth-rate of from 10 to 
20 per cent. among the four hundred million 
bearers of the Occidental torch is a phenomenon 
so vast and so pregnant as to excite the liveliest 

37 


CHANGING AMERICA 


Speculation. Some lay it to physiological steril- 
ity produced by alcohol, city life and over-civil- 
ization. There are, indeed, in some quarters, 
notably in New England, evidences of a decline 
in female fertility; but, on the whole, the lower 
birth-rate reflects the smaller size of families 
rather than the greater frequency of childless 
couples. New South Wales with a lower birth- 
rate than England has less than half her pro- 
portion of sterile unions. 

Others insist that vice, club-life, the comfort- 
able celibacy of cities, and the access of women 
to the occupations are turning people away from 
wedlock. It is true that the proportion of single 
women is increasing with us. Still, few peoples 
are so much married as Americans, and, for ail 
that, their birth-rate has fallen fast and fallen 
far. Michigan, which is about as addicted to the 
married state as any white community in the 
world, has only two-thirds the fecundity of Eng- 
land and half that of Hungary. 

The root causes of the general shrinkage in 
fecundity are certain characteristic tendencies 
in our civilization. 


38 


THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE 


SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 


Perhaps the. master force of our time is de- 
mocracy. The barriers of caste are down so 
that more and. more a man’s social standing de- 
pends upon himself. The lists of life are open 
to all, and the passion to “ succeed ” grows with 
the value of the prizes to be won. Never before 
did so many common people strain to reach a 
higher rung in the social ladder. But prudence 
bids these eager climbers avoid whatever will im- 
pede one’s ascent or imperil one’s footing. 
Children are incumbrances, so the ambitious 
dread the handicap of an early marriage and a 
large family. Even the unselfish, whose aim is 
to assure their children. a social position equal 
to or superior to their own, will see to it that 
there are not more children than they can prop- 
erly equip. 


THH CONTAGION OF WANTS 


The effect of democracy is reinforced by the 
break-up of custom. As fixed class distinctions 
fade out, people cease to be guided by the tra- 
ditional standard of comfort of their class. It 
is no longer enough to live as father and mother 
lived. Wants and tastes once confined to the 

39 


CHANGING AMERICA 


social elect, spread resistlessly downward and in- 
fect the masses. Tidal waves of imitation carry 
the craving for luxuries hitherto looked upon as 
the prerogative of the rich among millions of 
people of limited means, and these, in their self- 
ish haste to gratify their new wants, learn to 
economize in offspring. Here the decencies, 
there the comforts, yonder the vanities of life 
compete with the possible child and bar it from 
existence. 


THE RISING VALUE OF WOMAN 


So long as woman existed for wifehood alone, 
her childbirth pangs did not count. Uncon- 
sciously the husband accepted the dictum of 
Luther, “If a woman becomes weary or at last 
dead from bearing, that matters not; let her 
then die from bearing, she is there to do it.” 
But the great movement that has burst the fet- 
ters On woman’s mind, and opened to her so 
many careers, exalts her in the marriage part- 
nership and causes the heavy price of mother- 
hood to be more considered by her husband as 
well as by herself. 


BLESSINGS FROM THE LESSENING OF FECUNDITY 


However we account for the fall in the birth- 
40 


THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE 


rate, there is no question as to its consequences. 
The decline registers itself in a rising plane of 
comfort, a growth of small savings and a wider 
diffusion of ownership. Owing to the better 
care enjoyed by the aged when they do not 
have to compete for attention with an over- 
large brood of wailing infants, there Is a 
striking increase in longevity. A greater 
proportion of lives are rounded out to the 
Psalmist’s term. There is also a wonderful 
saving of life among infants, for often prolificacy 
does nothing but fill the churchyards with wee 
mounds. There is mournful meaning in the fact 
that the French Canadians, famed for their full 
quivers, show the census-taker no larger families 
than other Canadians. The shocking Slavic 
average of Seven or eight births to a mother, is 
shadowed by the needless loss during the first 
year of a full fourth of all those born. 

When we consider that in 1790 there were in 
this country just twice as many children under 
16 to adults over 20 as there are to-day we un- 
derstand why the law limits child labor and in- 
Sists on keeping children in school. The fact 
that now the average woman has about half as 
many children under 16 to look after as her 

41 


CHANGING AMERICA 


great-grandmother had throws a great light on 
the underlying causes of the women’s club move- 
ment, the changing notion of woman’s “ sphere,” 
the growing interest of women in public affairs, © 
and the equal suffrage movement. 

With big families vanishes what Bishop Pot- 
ter called “the slaughter of women in the in- 
terest of bearing sixteen children.” From the 
numerous gravestones to the third, fourth and 
even fifth wife in the Old New England burying 
grounds, we know that the teeming households of 
olden times were bought with a price and that 
the mothers paid it. The Puritan deification of 
fatherhood has well been characterized as “a 
system of female sacrifice — not to ancestors, but 
to descendants.”’ 


VANISHING OF THE OVERPOPULATION SPECTER 


But the supreme service of forethoughted 
parenthood is that it bids fair to deliver us from 
the overpopulation horror, which was becoming 
more imminent with every stride in medicine or 
public hygiene. Most of the Western peoples 
have now an excess of births over deaths of one 
per cent. a year. If even a third of this increase 
should find a footing over sea, the home expan- 

42 


THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE 


sion would still be such that, at a future date 
no more remote from us than the founding of 
Jamestown, Europe would groan under a popu- 
lation of three billions, while the United States 
of that day, with twice as many people as Europe 
now has, would be to China what China is to the 
present United States. Besides its attendant 
misery and degradation, population pressure 
sharpens every form of struggle among men,— 
competition, class strife, and war—and the 
dream of a moral redemption of our race would 
vanish into thin air if the enlightened peoples 
had failed to meet the crisis created by the re- 
duction of mortality. 

Once it seemed as if man’s propensity to 
multiply foredoomed him to live ever in the pres- 
ence of vast immedicable woe. However smiling 
the gardens of Daphne, they had always to slope 
down into a huge malodorous quagmire of 
wretchedness. The wheel of Ixion, the cup of 
Tantalus, symbolized humanity striving ever by 
labor and ingenuity to relieve itself of a painful 
burden, only to have that burden inexorably 
rolled back upon it by its own fatal fecundity. 
Who could have foreseen that the evangel of 
freedom, universal instruction and individual 

43 


CHANGING AMERICA 


self-development would so soon banish the over- 
population specter and clear the way for indef- 
inite progress? 

There is, to be sure, another side to the 
shield. 


THE UGLY SIDE OF RESTRICTION 


The new power to control the size of the fam- 
ily is at first wielded recklessly and selfishly. 
The very motives that have wholesomely mod- 
erated national fecundity prompt some couples 
to shirk all duties to the race. The egoistic 
dread of being handicapped in the pursuit of 
vanities might, if it became general, cause pop- 
ulation to dwindle even in an Eden. The 
shrinkage of thirty per cent. in the baby crop of 
roomy New South Wales in sixteen years is a 
portent. Are we coming to a time when the 
state will have to hire couples to produce chil- 
dren? 

Among the over-canny are found many stunted 
one-child and two-child families, the children of 
which are likely to lack in stamina and char- 
acter. Such a domestic ideal is morbid and nox- 
ious. The type it is safe to standardize is not 
the family of from one to three children, but the 

44 


THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE 


family of from four to six children. The dwarf 
family, which is getting all too common in some 
circles, will hurry to Avernus the class, the peo- 
ple or the race that adopts it. 

The rising are the first to become child-shy, 
and so, as the witty Frenchman observed, “ All 
the big families live in the little houses and all 
the little families live in the big houses.” Since 
half the nation’s children come from a quarter 
of the families, race deterioration soon sets in if 
the successful withhold their quota while the 
stupid multiply like rabbits. This recruitment 
from below is, however, a passing phase and 
some peoples are nearly by it. In England 
the careless prolificacy of the neglected masses 
is demonstrably lowering the race _ aver- 
age, but in democratic France, Scandivania, 
Australia and the United States the middle- 
sized family igs coming to prevail at all levels of 
society. 


COMING BARRIERS TO IMMIGRATION 


Now that cheap travel stirs the social deeps 
and far-beckoning opportunity fills the steer- 
ages, immigration becomes ever more Serious to 
the people that hopes to rid itself at least of 

45 


CHANGING AMERICA 


slums, “masses” and “submerged.” What is 
the good of practising prudence in the family if 
hungry strangers may crowd in and occupy at 
the banquet table of life the places reserved for 
its children? Shall it in order to relieve the 
teeming lands of their unemployed abide in the 
pit of wolfish competition and renounce the fair 
prospect of a growth in suavity, comfort and re- 
finement? If not, then the low-pressure society 
must not only slam its doors upon the indraught, 
but must double-lock them with forts and iron- 
clads, lest they be burst open by assault from 
Some quarter where “ cannon food ” is cheap. 
The rush of developments makes it certain that 
the vision of a globe “ lapt in universal law ” is 
premature. If the seers of the mid-century who 
looked for the speedy triumph of free trade had 
read their Malthus aright, they might have an- 
ticipated the tariff barriers that have risen on 
all hands within the last thirty years. So, to- 
day one needs no prophet’s mantle to foresee that 
presently the world will be cut up with immi- 
gration barriers which will never be leveled un- 
til the intelligent accommodation of numbers to 
resources has greatly equalized population pres- 
sure all over the globe. The French resent the 
46 









THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE 


million and a third aliens that have been 
squeezed into hollow and. prosperous France by 
pressure in the neighbor lands. The English re- 
strict immigration from the Continent. The 
Germans feel the thrust from the overstocked 
Slavic areas. The United States, Canada, Aus- 
tralia and South Africa are barring out the 
Asiatic. Dams against the color races, with 
spillways of course for students, merchants and 
travelers, will presently enclose the white man’s 
world. Within this area minor dams will pro- 
tect the high wages of the less prolific peoples 
against the surplus labor of the more prolific. 

Assuredly, every small-family nation will try 
to raise Such a dam and every big-family nation 
will try to break it down. The outlook for 
peace and disarmament is, therefore, far from 
bright. One needs but compare the population- 
pressures in France, Germany, Russia and Japan 
to realize that, even to-day, the real enemy of 
the dove of peace is not the eagle of pride or the 
vulture of greed but the stork! 


RESTRICTION AND RACE DESTINY 


The great point of doubt in birth restriction 
is the ability of the Western nations to retain 
A’ 


CHANGING AMERICA 


control of the vast African, Australasian and 
South American areas they have staked out as 
preserves to be peopled at their leisure with the 
diminishing overflow of their population. If 
underbreeding should leave them without the 
military strength that alone can defend their far 
flung frontiers in the Southern Hemisphere, 
those huge under-developed regions will as- 
suredly be filled with the children of the brown 
and the yellow races, and the whites will con- 
tribute less than they ought to the blood of the 
ultimate race that is to possess the globe. One 
starts at the thought that some day, when the 
Olympic games are held in a glittering capital 
by the waters of Victoria Nyanza, the Kirghiz- 
American champion of the hammer-throw may 
divide the banzais of the amphitheater with the 
almond-eyed winner of the Marathon race! 


48 


IV 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INCREASING DIVORCE 
THE PROVEN TREND 


WENTY years ago an investigation by the 
Department of Labor showed that, between 
1867 and 1886, 328,716 divorces had been 
granted in the United States, and that divorces 
were increasing two and one-half times as fast 
as population. The recent census for the period 
1887-1906 brings to light 945,625 divorces and 
establishes that the movement constantly gains 
in velocity. At present, probably one marriage 
in ten is broken by divorce and in some states 
the proportion may be as high as one in four. 
Forty years ago the broad contrast was between 
North and South; but the divorce rates of North 
and South have been converging, whereas those 
of East and West have diverged. The Central 
States have two and one-half times the rate of 
the Atlantic States, while for the Western States 
the proportion is three and one-half. 
Although the tide of divorce is rising the 
world over, nowhere is it so high, nowhere is it 
49 


CHANGING AMERICA 


rising so fast as in the United States. Our rate 
is twice that of Switzerland, thrice that of 
France, five times that of Germany and many 
times that of England and Canada. 

The census figures dissipate many false im- 
pressions. It is often assumed that many 
couples separate precipitately after the first 
quarrel before they have given marriage a fair 
trial. But the average interval before separa- 
tion exceeds six and one-half years, and is not 
diminishing. Since more than half the couples 
lived together above four years, while in the 
majority of cases the duration of marriage ex- 
ceeded seven years, it would be rash to surmise 
that people are forming risky and unstable 
unions in full view of their easy dissolution. 

Nor is divorce usually sought in order to re- 
marry. In Connecticut during a period of 
years the number of divorced persons married — 
was about 40 per cent. of the number divorced 
in the same time. In Rhode Island from 1889 to 
1896 the proportion was only 28 per cent. Re-— 
marriage is one of those cases in which, as Doc- 
tor Johnson puts it, “ hope triumphs over experi- 
ence,” and it is not at all certain that the rate 
for divorced persons much exceeds that for wid- 

50 . 


INCREASING DIVORCE 


ows and widowers of the same age. Certainly 
the restrictions many states are imposing on re- 
marriage do not seem to affect appreciably the 
divorce rate. 

It is doubtful if one divorce in twenty is ob- 
tained by migrating to a “liberal” state. The 
_ Social prominence of such exiles gives them a 
newspaper and magazine notoriety out of all re- 
lation to their numbers. <A divorce “ colony ” at 
Reno or Cheyenne obscures the fact that the 
practice has descended among the plain people, 
few of whom can afford to seek relief outside 
their own state. 


MISINTERPRETATIONS 


It is erroneous to suppose that the cause and 
cure of the drift toward divorce is to be found 
in legislation. Twenty years ago Professor Will- 
cox, on the basis of the most rigid investigations, 
declared “the immediate, direct and measurable 
influence of legislation is subsidiary, unimpor- 
tant, almost imperceptible.” Says Dr. Dike, 
the Secretary of the National League for the 
Protection of the Family: “ The direct influence 
of lax laws in producing the great increase of 
divorce in the last forty years is relatively 

51 


CHANGING AMERICA 


small.” Moreover, the tendency of legislation 
for the last twenty years has been decidedly in 
the direction of greater stringency. 

The failing grip of the legal institution need 
not entail a corresponding abandonment of the 
hallowed ideal of marriage as a lifelong union. 
If the iron clamp be loosed, it does not follow 
that the silken cord: is weaker. Although in 
thirty-eight years, the resort to divorce has be- 
come three times as frequent, there is little to 
show that couples are taking the vows of wed- 
lock with any other desire or expectation than 
union till death. Nor can we conclude that 
wronged spouses are less faithful than formerly 
to this ideal. The loveless couples of the good 
old times appear to have been held together by 
publie opinion, religious ordinance, ignorance of 
a remedy, the expense of divorce, or the wife’s 
economic helplessness, rather than by a heroic 
fidelity to an ideal. 

In nineteen cases out of twenty the marriage 
purports to be shattered by some flagrant wrong, 
such as adultery, cruelty, drunkenness, deser- 
tion, imprisonment for crime, or neglect to pro- 
vide. Nevertheless, the growth of divorce can- 
not be taken as a sure sign of increasing de- — 

52 


‘INCREASING DIVORCE 


pravity on the part of husbands or wives. 
Often the “ cause ” that figures in the record is a 
screen for some deep-seated irritant. People 
will not allow their inmost domestic affairs to 
be dragged into newspaper publicity. Physi- 
cians declare that many marital troubles have 
their roots in the pathology of sex, and do not 
argue moral fault on the part of either spouse. 

Some of those who speak with utmost posi- 
tiveness on the divorce problem betray a strange 
confusion of thought. A new legal cause for di- 
vorce is stigmatized as “an assault upon the 
marriage compact,” as if divorce ever broke up a 
happy home. The clergyman who characterizes 
a divorce law as “a statute undermining the 
very substructure of society ” implies that noth- 
ing but coercion holds man and wife together. 
One divine, with unconscious cynicism, de- 
nounces divorce as “ threatening the very founda- 
tions of the home.” Another, who beseeches us 
to “ protect the poor from the evils of loose di- 
vorce statutes ” evidently conceives permission to 
Separate as a malignant entity, going about rend- 
ing harmonious households. One judge pic- 
tures it as “the antipodal foe of marriage ” 
which “invades the home and defiles its sanc- 

53 


CHANGING AMERICA 


tities,” under the curious notion that there are 
any “sanctities ” left in the home made hideous 
by brutality or drunkenness. Still more bizarre 
is the idea that by denying release to the mis- 
mated we shall “restore the purity of our 
homes.” Very likely the oft-noted purity of 
homes and faithfulness to the legal tie in this 
country is in some relation to the opportunity 
of the dissatisfied to secure relief on a legal 
basis instead of following secret amorous in- 
trigue. 

Evidently there is widespread failure to dis- 
tinguish between symptom and disease. 


ECONOMIC CAUSES 


In view of the fact that two-thirds of the di- 
vorces are granted to the wife, it is safe to say 
that the majority of them would not be sought 
but for the access of women to the industrial 
field. Between 1870 and 1900, while population 
doubled, the number of working women trebled. 
No doubt the openings for women multiplied yet 
faster. More and more we live in cities and the 
city gives the woman her chance. The smallness 
of the alimony contingent — for only one wife in 
eight obtains alimony — and the presence of 55 

54 


INCREASING DIVORCE 


per cent. of all divorced women among the bread- 
winners indicate that in most cases the wife who 
seeks a divorce expects to support herself. 
Hence, the better her prospect of solving the 
bread-and-butter question by her own efforts, the 
oftener the aggrieved wife will pluck up courage 
to break her fetters and face the world alone. 
Possibly the fact that in the North the wife 
takes the initiative in 71 per cent. of the cases, 
while in the South the wife seeks release in only 
55 per cent. of the cases, is not owing to the 
greater meekness and patience of Southern 
wives but hinges on the difference in the indus- 
trial opportunity for women in the two sections. 

It has been noticed that the communities in 
which early marriage is the rule are the most 
free from divorce. ‘The reason is that early sub- 
jection to the marital yoke hinders the woman 
developing to her full stature. There is no de- 
mand of a developing personality more insistent 
than the liberty to bestow or to withhold one’s 
self and one’s love; whereas the dwarfed per- 
sonality feels no imperative need for self-dis- 
posal, no profanation in accepting the mate pro- 
vided. Says Professor Willcox: “Only six- 
teen to twenty years of age when she passes out 

55 


CHANGING AMERICA 


of the control of her father and mother into that 
of a husband, with no taste of freedom inter- 
vening, with a mind and character so unformed 
as easily to be brought into harmony with or 
Submission to her husband’s, with no way of es- 
cape open to her after marriage, whatever the 
law may say, what wonder that the peasant 
woman of Russia, Ireland, or elsewhere, shows 
little inclination to divorce!” 

Now, in the United States, the age at which 
women first marry is steadily rising. In Masgsa- 
chusetts the average is about twenty-five years. 
In Russia, nearly three brides out of five are 
under twenty. With us, thanks to woman’s 
chance to earn, only one-ninth of the girls under 
twenty are married. Two-fifths of the girls be- 
tween the ages of sixteen and twenty-four are 
bread-winners, and after the seven years of in- 
dependence, which is the lot of the average young 
working woman, they enter upon wedlock with a 
high spirit that will not brook subjection. 

Nor is it to be forgotten that specialized in- 
dustry in a way unfits a young woman for mar- 
riage by weaning her from the domestic arts. 
The girl married at eighteen directly from the 
parental home is more likely to make and keep a 

56 


INCREASING DIVORCE 


home happy than the girl who marries at twenty- 
five after some years in factory, store or office. 
Without her old housekeeping knack and despis- 
ing the crude work of the kitchen, the latter too 
often fails to make home comfortable, and the 
couple sink into a misery which may end in do- 
mestic shipwreck. The demoralizing reaction 
of home-slackness is brought out by studies made 
by Cadbury in Birmingham. There the propor- 
tion of sober and steady men is nearly twice as 
great in families where the wives do not work 
out as in homes presided over by employed 
women. 

Incessantly the facto lanes away the eco- 
nomic basis of tio family. In the Gime of aE 
grandmothers the home was the seat of a score 
of productive processes, and the ideal wife was 
the “virtuous woman” celebrated by Solomon. 
She might not be a “ soul-mate” to her husband, 
but she was a prop to the prosperity of the 
household. Now that the machine has captured 
most of the domestic processes and the middle 
class home is sustained by the earnings of the 
husband, the wife from a helpmeet has become a 
luxury. If, now, there is a rift in the lute, the 
husband becomes conscious of carrying a bur- 

57 


CHANGING AMERICA 


den, and resents things that are overlooked in 
the wife who is a true yoke-fellow. 

On the other hand, the capable, unencumbered 
woman, who finds herself doomed by social con- 
vention to be supported in idleness by a husband 
who can earn, perhaps, little more than she can, 
is also making a sacrifice — a sacrifice which she 
will chafe under in case the marriage fails to 
Satisfy her affections. 

In a word, outside of the manual laboring 
class, the old economic framework of the family 
has largely fallen away, leaving more of the 
strain ta come on the personal tie. Husband 
and wife are held together by love, conscience, 
and convention, but very little by that profitable 
copartnership which once contributed so much 
to the stability of the home. 


INTELLECTUAL CAUSES 


The intellectual progress of women swells the 
demand for matrimonial surgery. To-day two 
ideals of the family are struggling for mastery 
_— the old despotic family, of Roman origin and 
ecclesiastical sanction, based on the authority of 
the husband and the merging of the wife’s legal 
personality in his, and the democratic family of 

58 


INCREASING DIVORCE 


Germanic origin based on the consenting and 
harmonious wills of two equals. The one goes 
naturally with pioneering, agriculture and war- 
fare, which put men to the fore; the other goes 
with industry, peace and city life, which add to 
the consequence of women. In proportion as 
women escape from abject mental dependence on 
men and find a point of view of their own, they 
spurn patriarchal claims and expect marriage to 
be the union of equal wills. What with more 
girls than boys in the high schools and half as 
many women as men in college, it is not sur- 
prising that women more and more enter mar- 
riage with a connubial ideal of their own. 
Nevertheless, the men they wed — many of them 
— cherish the conviction that the husband is the 
rightful “head” of the family. The resulting 
clash of ideals is none the less disastrous because 
it is but an incident of a transition process in so- 
cial evolution. 

The intellectual ferment of our time weakens 
the grasp of the social institution upon the in- 
nocent individual. The voice of authority — 
whether it appeals to precedent, to doctrine, or 
to Holy Writ — is little heeded. No longer is 
a rigid arrangement able to hedge itself about 

59 


CHANGING AMERICA 


with a divine sanction. The question “ Qui 
bono” is in the air. Any policy that crushes 
the individual or blocks his pursuit of happi- 
ness is challenged and obliged to produce the 
best of credentials. The feeling that “ marriage 
is for man, not man for marriage” is — along 
with heresy trials and contempt of the courts 
—an outcome of the reigning spirit of criticism. 
Now, as ever, lawmaker and theologian stand 
ready to bind on hapless persons heavy burdens 
and grievous to be borne —for the callousness 
of the well-wed to the woes of the mismated 
passes all belief — but public sentiment is mas- 
ter to-day; and public sentiment, taking the pro- 
motion of happiness as the end of human insti- 
tutions, flinches from keeping the unhappy 
locked together when no demonstrable harm will 
result. Any one who would turn this senti- 
ment against divorce must appeal to sociology 
rather than to dogma. 

An inevitable by-product of the liberation of 
women from men, and of both from Tradition, 
is a rank individualism which makes a lasting 
union impossible, and thus defeats the end for 
which marriage exists. No doubt much of the 
infidelity that purports to lie at the root of a 

60 


INCREASING DIVORCE 


sixth of the cases of divorce is an expression of 
this exaggerated self-will. Let it be remem- 
bered, however, that no emancipation ever takes 
place without producing evils of this kind. 
When independence and the assertion of rights 
are in the air, there is sure to be some who be- 
come acutely conscious of their rights before 
they realize their duties. The marriage of per- 
sons of a dilated ego unwilling to bear or sacri- 
fice for the sake of preserving the union cannot 
but result in disaster. 


THE PROSPECT 


It has been calculated that if the movement 
toward divorce retains its present velocity, in 
forty years one marriage in four will end by di- 
vorce, and in eighty years one marriage in two. 
No one who understands the vital role of the 
family in a healthy society anticipates any such 
disastrous outcome. Already there are in sight 
certain influences that are likely to moderate the 
headlong movement. The industrial and intel- 
lectual emancipation of women will, of course, 
complete itself. But the old despotic ideal of 
the family will die out of men’s minds and cease 
to be a breeder of conjugal discord. The dis- 

61 


CHANGING AMERICA 


trust of institutions can hardly go much further. 
It is likely that the public, as it wins a deeper 
insight into the services of the family to society 
and to the race, will feel less sympathy with the 
wrong-doings, weaknesses and whims that shat- 
ter it. Individualism, too, is probably at its 
zenith. In the discussion of human relations 
we are likely to hear less of the radical and more 
of the ethical note. In proportion as the eman- 
cipated are led to an ethical view of life, they 
will cease to regard marriage simply as a fair 
weather arrangement with personal happiness 
in constant view. They will recognize its inex- 
orable demands for patience and self-control, for 
loyalty through sorrow and Sickness, through 
misfortune and the aging years. 


REMEDIES 


The fact that accelerated divorce is produced 
by the modern social situation rather than by 
moral decay does not make it any less the symp- 
tom of a great evil. That one marriage in ten 
openly fails calls for vigorous effort to lessen 
the number of bad marriages. The school should 
instruct girls in the domestic arts which sup- 
ply the material basis of the home. There 

62 


INCREASING DIVORCE 


Should be systematic instruction of youth in the 
ethics and ideals of the family. The fact that 
the likelihood of divorce is in inverse proportion 
to the length of time the parties were acquainted 
before marriage suggests the wisdom of requir- 
ing a formal declaration of intention to marry 
some weeks before a marriage license will be 
issued. Law or custom ought to devise some 
means of protecting pure women from marriage 
with men infected from vice. A way may be 
found to detect and punish the husbands who 
desert their families. Finally, the fact that in- 
temperance figures in nearly a fifth of the di- 
vorces ought to invigorate the temperance move- 
ment in all its branches. 


63 


Vv 
WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


HERE are about five million women en- 

gaged in gainful occupations in the United 
States. This number is increasing much more 
rapidly than is the general population. The 
reason why women in such great numbers are 
coming into our shops and factories is not be- 
cause of a restlessness which makes them im- 
patient with the walls of home and carries them 
out into regions of danger and strain, but 
simply because the factory has been invading the 
home and has snatched out almost every useful 
task that used to be performed there. In the 
home there still remains the preparation of food 
and the rearing of children; but the preparation 
of garments, the preparation of all sorts of 
household linen, the large number of industries 
that used to be carried on in the homes have van- 
ished, and the young women have had to follow 
them up and pursue these occupations where 
they are now being conducted — in the factory. 

64 


ire Ak poe can Pine gan) fs: Dee ee [ 


a 


WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


Formerly women, by their indoor occupations 
or the things they created there, were adding a 
very important element to the support of the 
family, but with the vanishing of these indus- 
tries the woman has to go out after a job. 

It is important to remember, not only that 
there are about five million of these laboring 
women, but that a very large number of them 
are young. You have not an army of women 
permanently enlisted in the field of labor. That 
is not the idea. A very large number of them 
are young women who will marry. If they did 
not marry there would have to be a vast increase 
of celibacy in this country. In the country at 
large about one-third of the single women be- 
tween the ages of 15 and 25 are engaged in oc- 
cupations outside their homes; and in the cities 
about 50 per cent. ; so that very nearly half of all 
the single young women in the country are at 
work. Between the ages of 25 and 35, about one- 
fifth of the number are so engaged. What does 
that mean? It means that they are being mar- 
ried — vanishing into homes; that their lives are 
changed, that they are being rescued from the 
factories. So you must think of a great and in- 
creasing proportion of the young women who are 

65 


CHANGING AMERICA 


destined to become wives and the mothers of the 
next generation, coming for about five years un- 
der the influence of the factory and store. 
Now, there they come under conditions which 
are not controlled by people who love them. In 
their homes they are surrounded by conditions 
shaped by affection. The moment they are mar- 
ried they pass into another home and there find 
conditions shaped by affection. But during 
that interval when they are out earning money, 
somewhere in the years between 15 and 25, they 
are under conditions not shaped by anybody 
who has any interest whatever in them. They 
go up against the rivalry of employers for profit. 
Who is to protect them during that epoch? As 
things are at present they have to protect them- 
Selves. There is no father and mother to pro- 
tect them; no husband. Can they protect them- 


selves? Hardly. In the first place is the girl 
She values wages. Possibly she will strike for 
0 nena 

higher wages; but_is she aware of what that 
standing all day is doing to her? Is she aware 
of what sitting on that seat without any back is 
doing to her? Is she aware of what that breath- 
less rush is doing to her? Not at all. Against 

66 


WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


these things she wi e no protest. She is_ 
not aware of what is happening to her. To tell 


the truth, she is not a competent guardian of her 
future life. eee 

“Even if she were a competent guardian, this 
rattle-brained girl with a modicum of education 
and very little knowledge of hygiene — even if 
she did understand the laws of health and did 
realize exactly what happens to her when she is 
Subjected for ten or twelve hours a day to the 
pace dictated by machinery, she would, never- 
theless, in many cases be powerless to influence 
conditions for the better. The reason is simply 
this: When people have options so that they 
can reject an unattractive proposition, they can 
improve their condition. If a girl is offered a 
task which is to be performed under a constant 
Strain, or in an unsanitary place, and there is 
Some other paying work she can do in place of 
accepting that job, then she is in a position to 
defend her health and her comfort if she values 
them. 

The options people have depend, for one thing, 
upon how much they are ahead. A person who 
has something laid by so that he can afford to 
take a risk and allow for an idle three months 

67 





CHANGING AMERICA 


is in a much better position to throw up a job 
which he feels is undermining his health than is 
the person who does not dare face two weeks 
without wages. A civil engineer who happens 
to be idle is invited to go to Panama. He real- 
izes that going to Panama involves the risk that 
he may die of the fever, and he declines the offer. 
With perhaps a whole year before him in which 
to secure a position, he is vastly more independ- 
ent than the man who has only three months, 
and he can reject an offer that seems to involve 
a risk. And the person who has three months 
in which to look around is far better off than 
the person who can only take three weeks. And 
the girl who has no money but her weekly wage, 
from. which there is and can be no surplus, has no 
option at all. The more you get people in the 
position where they have no option, where they 
dare not let go, where they are afraid if they let 
this job go they may not get another job quick 
enough —the more helpless they are and the 
more easily you can impose on them. If the 
laundryman says, “ We expect you to work all 
night to get out this big order we have prom- 
ised,” the girls have to accept the situation. If 
he says, “ You have got to work all day Sunday,” 
68 


WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


they must obey no matter how exhausted they 
are. 

The smaller the margin between _one’s_re- 
sources and one’s necessities the more helpless 
‘one is, the more unmurmuringly one has to ac- 
¢ept whatever conditions are laid down. And 
So in the stratum of labor in which there is no 
space, no margin, between necessary expenses 
and income, you get people that may sometimes 
be driven almost as slaves are driven; you get a 
Situation that is incompatible with a Christian 
civilization. 

Not only has an increasing number of women 
who are to become wives and mothers in the fu- 
ture been brought into conditions controlled by 
people who have no interest in their futures; but 
these conditions are becoming more and more 
taxing. There was a time when a group of work 
people were speeded up by having a pace-maker. 
A girl would be paid to hurry things up, thus 
giving a leverage to rush the pace of others. 
Still, there was always a limit to the speed that 
pace-maker could impose. but with the coming 
in of machinery you can, by means of the ma- 
chine, dictate the rate at which the girls must 
work. They then have to keep up with the ma- 

69 











CHANGING AMERICA 


chine or drop out. And so, by speeding up the — 
machinery, you bring about a situation where 
young people are kept at the tightest possible 
tension, are keyed up to the utmost. At that 
point you get something more than a strain 
upon muscles; you get a strain upon nerves. 
There is a certain natural pace one can keep up. 
Force the pace and you get weariness. A man 
can go for hours at the rate of five miles an 
hour; he can run at the rate of six miles an 
hour for quite a long while; but if he tries to 
run eight miles an hour he will drop out very 
soon. I once was secretary of a national or- 
ganization and, rather than go down town to 
the stenographic bureau to dictate my letters, I 
formed the habit of writing them myself at high 
speed. In that one year I incurred a neuras- 
thenia that it took four years to overcome. Not 
that I had done so much work. I probably had 
done one-third more than I would normally. It 
was the pace that told. 

There is universal testimony that the pace of 
industry was never so great as now. ‘Take the 
number of stitches that your sewing machines in 
the shops are setting. Machines that in 1899 
were setting twenty-two hundred a minute were 

70 


WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


in 1905 setting just twice as many. In those 
years the pace has been doubled; and, moreover, 
Some of the machines set several rows of stitches 
at a time. In cotton factories how many looms 
is a workman supposed to tend? One loom, 
two, three, four, and finally you get up to Six or 
Seven I have been told. In the stock yards you 
can take the number of carcasses a man was ex- 
pected to split in an hour during the last twenty 
years and see the increase that has been made, 
not through any extraneous aid but through key- 
ing up the pace. 

For my part, I do not know what is going to 
be the outcome of this tendency toward the 
double-quick. It is a real puzzle to me. For 
the present there is one thing I see to be done, 
and that is to compensate for this superhuman 
pace by shortening the time. A certain pace 
may be endured through an eight-hour day that 
cannot be endured for a ten-hour day. 

Now, what is the effect of working young 
women, usually in a standing position, at a rate 
dictated by machinery at high Speed? I cannot 
go into details here; but there is no question 
that unless they are extraordinarily strong it is 
draining them of that stamina and vitality which 

71 


CHANGING AMERICA 


ought to be saved to enable them to meet suc- 
cessfully the strains and burdens of wifehood 
and motherhood. Girls may endure this thing 
for, say, five years, but in what condition do they 
pass into the home? Have they the resources 
of vitality for meeting the absolutely inevitable 
strains of the home that they ought to have? 
We know that long hours, in the confinement of 
the factory, with the nerves continually frayed 
by the noise, with the sickening smell of the ma- 
chine oil, often with too great heat and impure 
dust-laden air, standing at machinery going a 
relentless pace, produces a general deterioration 
of the physical tone. Standing causes various 
disorders: varicose veins and displacements; the 
confinement produces anemia and the general 
undermining of the system fosters a tendency to 
tuberculosis. Even if nothing tragic happens 
before the time when that young woman is 
handed over to the young man who loves her to 
become a wife and the mother of a family, it 
will later be found that she cannot meet the 
tests. Cannot you imagine what will happen 
with the first baby, or the second baby? A 
rapid collapse often occurs — not early death 
perhaps, but dragging years of misery, of in- 
2 


WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


ability to be a helpmate, inability to rear a full- 
Sized family, inability to bring into the world 
children with their proper share of stamina and 
vitality. You can see that society is paying 
pretty heavily for the service the girl rendered 
to industry during those few years of mill work. 
And think of the discouraging situation of the 
young man who, after he has been married two 
or three years, finds he has a wife who at the 
age of 28 or 30 has broken down, become a 
miserable invalid, suffering aches and pains all 
the time and unable to keep the home attractive. 
Think of him having to face twenty, thirty years 
of it, and all because of what? Because of just 
a few extra dollars added to the profits of the 
employer or a few extra dollars saved to the con- 
Sumer of the goods she has helped to make! 
You see that sort of thing is waste; it is eat- 


a aneiarnennanateeneitnnnasenscenst <> Hsia testi Jae inenindaemarints 
ing up capital. For health and_vitality are 


capital to the laborer. When a person is worn 
out society says: “We feel that we are obliged 
to take this burden on our shoulders and see that 
nobody actually starves,” and so, whatever hu- 
man wreckage is created by this excessive haste 
and these excessive hours of industry is not 
borne by the industry that created it, but is just 
73 


CHANGING AMERICA 


coolly rolled on to the broad shoulders of so- 
ciety —for the sake of pennies, creating bur- 
dens that will cost dollars. 

Now, whatever wreckage is created by these 
conditions tends to spread out. It leaves re- 
sults in a progeny that does not start in life 
with a fair chance, a progeny born tired because 
the mother was fagged when she bore them. 
Hence you have people becoming vagrants, or 
idlers, or paupers in many cases, instead of be- 
ing self-supporting men and women. Start peo- 
ple without a fair show in life, and they cannot 
endure to the end. In the thirties, maybe, the 
sag or break will come. Unable to meet con- 
ditions, they cannot keep up the pace and they 
drop back. Once they fall upon the feather 
mattress of charity, once they lose their self- 
respect, they are perfectly happy and comfort- 
able, perfectly willing to lie upon the pocket- 
book of society. 

There is another consideration. Society can 
have the kind of women it wants. Take the 
women of eastern Prussia, for instance. These 
peasant women bear a child in the morning; in 
the afternoon they are out in the field. There 
the women work right along beside the men. I 

74. 


WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


have seen them and what a type are they? 
Squat, splay-footed, wide-backed, flat-breasted, 
broad-faced, short-necked —a type that lacks 
every grace that we associate with woman. For 
that is the only type that could survive under 
the harsh conditions that have prevailed there 
for centuries. Now, there will not be a disap- 
pearance of the race if we extend no hand to 
help these working girls. What will happen 
will be that the girls of the distinctly feminine 
type, the girls who have the qualities of fine- 
ness, grace and charm, will prove too fragile 
to meet the conditions. They will collapse and 
go to the bad, they will lose their health, or, if 
they endure until they are married and become 
mothers, they will not be able to be mothers of 
full families of sons and daughters that will en- 
dure to the end. 

But some there would be who could stand the 
conditions. And of what type would they be? 
They would be of this other type—the 
type that appears in those peasant women. In 
three or four generations we could have in this 
country, all through the lower stratum, that 
coarse type replacing the high-strung, high-bred, 
feminine type which is our pride, and which ex- 

V5 


CHANGING AMERICA 


tends up and down through all layers of society 
in this country. Do we want to have that dif- 
ferentiation of physique? Do we want to have 
a reversion, down in the stratum that has to 
work with its hands, of the feminine form to 
the masculine peasant type, to that Flemish- 
mare type that has lost the charm and grace of 
woman? 

What can be done about it? 

In the first place, it cannot be cured by in- 
dividual action on the part of the girls them- 
Selves. People who are getting twenty dollars 
a week can probably exercise a certain control 
over the conditions under which they work. 
People who have options, who can afford to let 
go and look about them, can oblige the employer 
to bring the job to the point of attractiveness. 
But this stratum of girls who are not highly 
skilled, who are learners, and who are driven 
by machinery, have no margin with which to 
fight to improve conditions, and even if they did 
have the margin they do not know what condi- | 
tions they ought to have to protect themselves. 
Nor can they fight for these conditions by col- 
lective action, because most of these young 
women are not in a position to wield the labor 

76 


WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


organization to the same extent and to do with 
it the same things that men are able to. Why 
not? For one thing, they are women, and just 
because of that their attitude toward unpleas- 
ant features in their situation is less aggressive 
and resentful than that of men. Men are al- 
ways more willing to strike back, to make some 
sort of struggle against crushing conditions 
than are women, because it is their nature. 
And again, these young women have not had a 
long-enough experience and observation of in- 
dustry to realize what organization might do for 
them. They do not believe in it; they are not 
far-sighted enough; they know too little of eco- 
nomics. Again, they do not struggle to improve 
the conditions under which they work because 
there is always that door on beyond, the door 
that may be opened by marriage. ‘ What’s the 
use? Next year I may be married, and it 
wouldn’t make any difference.” There is al- 
ways that possible exit — an exit that for a vast 
number of them is not an exit. Young women 
will not pay dues, will not incur the risk of 
losing their jobs by making an effort to lay 
down conditions to employers as will men, who 
know that their lives long they will have to be 
rr 


CHANGING AMERICA 


workers and that therefore it is to their inter- 
est to look ahead and try to shape the conditions 
they will encounter year after year indefinitely. 

Nor can you cure this situation by appealing 
to the humanity of the employers. If the par- 
ticular employer is a monopolist, or has some 
advantage over all his competitors, then you. 
may work upon his humanity, and, if he chooses 
to give good conditions to those girls, he can do 
so. But when he has lively competition, the 
humane employer is obliged to conform to the 
practice of his competitors. A laundryman may 
hate to keep the girls after six or on Sunday, or 
to work them beyond their strength; neverthe- 
less for him the price of laundering is fixed by 
the cost of it in other laundries where all these 
things are done, and he is obliged to conform 
in order to keep his business. The great law in 
business competition is that the plane of prac- 
tice will be determined by what the least scru- 
pulous man who succeeds in the business is 
willing to adopt. That determines the plane to 

hich the rest are obliged to approximate. But 
Some may suggest, “ Can’t you get the employ- 
ers as a body to change conditions? ”- That is a 
frail reed to lean on. You may get most of them 

78 


WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


to agree that the pace which they are inflicting 
upon these young women is too hard, and yet, 
if one man in ten does not look at it that way 
and persists in the old methods with his help, 
the other nine-tenths of the employers will be 
helpless. ‘They cannot coerce him. He can 
oblige them to conform to him, whereas they can 
not oblige him to conform to them. What re- 
course, then, have you left? There is nothin 

left except the will of organized society express- 
ing itself in law. There is absolutely nothing 
else. 

Now what will happen if society decrees a cer- 
tain standard working day suited to the health 
and strength of the average young woman, so 
that the destruction of her vitality and stamina 
through overstrain. would be the rare exception? 
Will anything dire happen? Will the linchpins 
of industry fall out? Will things go to smash? 
Not at all. One of two things will happen. 
In industries which are monopolies there will 
be less profit for employers. In industries 
which are not monopolies the consumers will 
have to pay a little more. The fact is, we as 
consumers are enjoying some things on terms to 
which we have no right. We have no right to 

v9 


CHANGING AMERICA 


have artificial flowers at the price we get them; 
we have no right to get our laundry done so 
cheaply as it often is; we have no right to any- 
thing that has not paid the full bill. When you 
buy a keg of powder, you pay not only for the 
cost of making that powder, but part of the cost 
of all the powder that blew up accidentally, and, 
once every seven years, you and other buyers 
have to pay for the mill itself, because on an 
average once in Seven years the whole thing is 
blown up. Queer, isn’t it, that in paying for 
the powder you get you also pay for powder 
which you never get. But a stranger thing is 
that you do not pay anything at all for the men 
who are destroyed when the mills blow up. 
When you buy coal you pay for a fraction of 
all the damage by explosions in that mine, but 
nothing for the arms and legs of the human be- 
ings who are wrecked. Is it right that there 
should be charged in the cost of the products 
of industry only the wreckage of property but 
not the wreckage of human beings? Is it right 
for us to get some products so cheaply that only 
the part of the cost has been covered? The 
part that we exempt employers from feeling is 
not passed on. If we oblige employers to meet 
80 


WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 


certain humane conditions the cost will be added 
in, passed on to us, and paid by us. 

Some say, “Oh, but such laws infringe 
that great principle of freedom of contract! ” 
The young woman is willing to work through 
half the night in this laundry rather than lose 
her job. The law steps in and says, “ No, she 
shall not do it.” Harsh, isn’t it? There was a 
time when a man, if he had to borrow money to 
keep body and soul together, had a legal right to 
Sell himself into slavery as security for money 
with which to buy bread for his family and him- 
self. He had the right to promise, “If I do 
not repay that money by the stipulated date I 
will become your slave.” This produced debt- 
Slavery, which nearly wrecked early Greece and 
Rome, but finally came a statesman who decreed 
that forever more no man should have the legal 
right to pawn himself. Do you realize that you 
have not that right to-day; that throughout the 
civilized world that right is denied? They have 
that right in Sumatra and the Malay states to- 
day, but all the men of the white race have lost 
that ineffably precious right of a man to put 
himself in pawn. Pity, isn’t it? But we seem 
to get along pretty well, do we not? We don’t 

81 


CHANGING AMERICA 


seem anxious to borrow that freedom from the 
Malay states or Sumatra. So I think nothing 
very serious will happen if, on the ground that 
we have an interest larger than her interest, we 
deny a girl the right to sell more than a limited 
number of hours of labor per day. Society looks 
ahead, and she does not. And so perhaps, if we 
invade that principle of freedom of contract, 
nothing very terrible will happen because, after 
all, it is not real freedom that is at stake, but 
only a formal freedom. 

For the last twenty years I have been devot- 
ing all my effort to getting deeper into the prin- 
ciples of social organization, the principles by 
which human beings can work together with the 
greatest success and happiness; and I can look 
back to the time when I thought that certain 


abstract principles were the thing; that we did 

not have to consider what degree of happiness — 
they gave to people, but that planting ourselves 
upon these immutable principles, we should just 
shut our eyes, go ahead, and _all would be weli. 
I assure you the older I grow and the more I ex- 
plore different _social systems the more fluid 
these_principles become, until now, in social 
policy, I do not see anything at_stake but the 


welfare of men, and women and children. 
82 


VI 
COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


OUSIN JIM was bragging of his prosperity 

since he had removed to this Northwest- 
ern mining town, but Lucy looked up from her 
Sewing. “ Yes,” she said, “I know my husband 
makes twice as much here as he did in the old 
home. But then his rheumatism is worse, the 
altitude gets on our nerves, it is hard to raise 
flowers, the schools are not so good, we miss the 
sight of the peaks, and I can’t visit father and 
mother so often.” 

Here you have the contrast between the com- 
mercial view and the human view. The man 
thinks the worth of existence is measured by 
the money one can lay out. The woman with 
her keen sense for reality knows that only a 
part of one’s well-being comes that way. There 
are goods one cannot buy because they depend 
on general conditions. They are the non-eco- 
nomic goods. 

A student of mine investigating agriculture 

83 


CHANGING AMERICA 


in Mississippi asked a farmer near the state 
capital, who had had great success in breeding 
fine milch cows, why he did n’t run a dairy and 
double his income. ‘“ No,” he replied, “I don’t. 
want to have a business that will tie me down 
so I can’t hitch up and go off with my family to 
a barbecue now and then.” Was this man a 
fool — or a philosopher? 

Those who are business men —and nothing 
more —slip easily into the fallacy of rating 
well-being by dollar income. What this type of 
man most longs for is not welfare, but pros- 
perity. The wealth he habitually considers is 
bankable wealth. Values that are not pecuniary 
values strike him as moonshine. His ideal con- 
dition is high wages, big salaries and fat divi- 
dends; and any movement or policy that stands 
in the way of maximizing these “ hurts busi- 
ness ” and is anathema. 

“Come out to the ward meeting to-night and 
help us push for purer city water,” I said once 
to my neighbor, a young furniture merchant. 
“Can’t spare the time,’ was the reply; ‘too 
busy hustling for business.” When, three 
months later, his little daughter was convales- 
cing from a long and expensive illness of typhoid 

84 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


fever, it may have dawned upon him that some 
things need attention besides business! 

Such a man is the last to recognize that. busi- 
ness, if its claims be pressed too relentlessly, 
may cut away big non-economic values, that 
there are business profits that cost ten times 
their worth of salubrity or quiet or natural 
beauty or civic conscience. He sees business 
made lively in his town by the “wide open” 
policy; he is blind to the ruin of boys and the 
wreck of homes. He deprecates the great 
“clean-up” movement in government. “ Oh, 
yes, our house is dirty, to be sure, but then 
Sweeping raises such a dust, and dust is dis- 
turbing to business!” He grumbles at the anti- 
smoke ordinance that obliges manufacturers to 
spend a hundred thousand dollars in suppress- 
ing smoke that would destroy a million dollarg 
worth of comfort, and echoes the railroad presi- 
dent who says: “The smoke-laden air of every 
city is but a testimonial of the general pros- 
perity of the country.” He naturally sym- 
pathizes with the retort of the paper manu- 
facturers to the cry for free paper: “ If we could 
not have newspapers of the present Size, style 
and price, without driving out our paper indus- 

85 


CHANGING AMERICA 


try, which alternative would be better for the 
country —a larger wage-fund or smaller pa- 
pers? ” 


COMMERCIALISM IS NOT SELFISHNESS NOR 
MATERIALISM 


It is not a matter of selfishness. The com- 
mercialized man shows this bias when other 
men’s profits—not his own profits—are at 
stake. Tell him of the forests of half a moun- 
tain state blighted by the arsenic fumes from 
giant smelters and he replies it would cut cop- 
per dividends to get rid of these fumes. To him 
the cost we impose on the railroads by obliging 
them to elevate their tracks is a tragic thing; 
but the racking anxiety of mothers who are 
obliged daily to send their children to school 
over grade crossings appeals to him not at all. 
Outside of office hours men of this type are as 
humane and public-spirited as other people. 
But their point of view makes them side with 
profits when humanity and public spirit stand 
in their way. They are victims of a fallacy. 

Nor is commercialism the same thing as ma- 
teriaism. One need not be crass of soul to be 
smitten with this blindness. A man may take 

86 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


the demands of his business as the Voice from 
Sinai, yet lay out his profits in stained glass, in 
public libraries or in sending the Gospel to the 
heathen. 

My point is that there is a psychology of busi- 
ness which hinders its victims from seeing things 
in their true proportions. This is the more 
Serious because the commercial view is spread- 
ing and threatens to become our national way 
of thinking. 


THE ASCENDANCY OF BUSINESS IDEALS 


For, in sooth, business men are in the saddle. 
It is settled that no man who does not bear the 
O. K. of business men can ever be elected presi- 
dent. A candidate’s trump card is the promise 
of a “business” administration. “Success ” 
has come to mean the same as “ business suc- 
cess,” that is, making money. Often one hears 
“ You can’t run business on religious principles,” 
but never “ You can’t run religion on business 
principles.” The highest compliment you can 
pay a philanthropy, an educational scheme, or a | 
missionary project is to pronounce it “ business- | 
like”; whereas a man is insulted if you pro- 
nounce his business “ philanthropic,” or “ edu- 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


cational,” or “ missionary-like.” We have a new 
moral type — the sheep in wolf’s clothing — for 
the employer who provides rest-rooms and seats 
with backs for his working girls feels obliged to 
dissemble his humanity by pretending he does it 
“simply to augment output! ” 

Our school board must, of course, be a “ busi- 
ness board,” i.e., one that bothers little with the 
problemy of teaching the children, but knows 
how to keep teachers in their places and get the 
lowest bids on text books and coal. For a while 
it was considered fitting that such amiable vi- 
sionaries as scholars should be picked and offi- 
cered by a business man as university president. 
More and more the solid men of business are 
looked to to finance the philanthropies, support 
the churches, and endow the colleges; for be- 
side their dollars how paltry look the nickels 
of the other sorts of successful men! 

Among Americans business ideals are not held 
in check by the influence of a landed aristocracy. 
In most of the Old World the leading social 
class despises the trader’s point of view and 
prides itself on appreciating things from the en- 
joyer’s view point. The standard for judging a 
thing or an activity is not how much it fetches, 

88 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


but how much it adds to the worth of life. 
Since this aristocratic emphasis on living rather 
than on money-making leeches down through 
the general community, commercialism is in 
Kurope more confined to the business class. 


THE BANISHING OF “‘ SENTIMENT ” FROM 
BUSINESS 


The escape of business from the control of hu- 
man Sentiment and conscience has been aided 
by new forms of management. Most important 
enterprises are now organized as corporations, 
which means that the owners are not the same 
persons as the managers. Of such there are 
reckoned sixty-seven hundred (exclusive of 
banking and insurance companies) with a cap- 
italization of thirty-six billions. Every year 
Sees the stock-holders on whose behalf the enter- 
prise is conducted more numerous, more scat- 
tered, more shepherded by the big insiders, 
more ignorant of the business they draw divi- 
dends from. Then, as if to eliminate the per- 
Sonal element altogether, between the men who 
provide the money and the men who run the busi- 
ness there is interposed the financial institution 
in the form of savings bank, trust company or 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


insurance company. Moreover, when the busi- 
ness passes out of personal or local hands and is 
offered in shares to the general investing public, 
the Big Men have carefully seen to it that the 
stock is watered to the limit, so that frequently 
nothing but the most avaricious, ruthless, and ag- 
gressive management can enable the stock to pay 
ordinary returns to the innocent investors. 
Now, the manager under this system has in- 
vented a marvelous device for transmitting this 
remorseless pressure to the superintendents un- 
der him. This is the weekly cost statement. 
Tor example, the head of each lard room in a 
group of affiliated packing plants files at the 
office a statement from which can be figured the 
exact cost-per-unit of his output. This enables 
the management to compare a man’s showing on 
a given week with the performance of his pred- 
ecessors, with his own previous performance, 
and with the performance of the heads of other 
lard departments. If the comparison is in the 
least unfavorable to him, the superintendent is 
warned, and if his showing does not soon im- 
prove he loses his job. Such cost-checking keys , 
up technical efficiency, but it also forces bosses 
to go to the limit in driving labor or deteriorat- 
90 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


ing product for the sake of a dollar of gain. 

The Pittsburgh Survey tells us how this de- 
vice worked in the steel industry. “When a 
mill broke a record, the men who accomplished 
the feat were praised, . . . while the su- 
perintendents of other mills taunted their men 
with the disgrace of being beaten. This would 
rouse all the skilled men to greater activity, and 
another mill would establish a new record.” 
“They kept raising the pace until finally, when 
it had reached a very high point, the superin- 
tendent told them that, having demonstrated 
their ability to produce that much steel, it 
would thereafter be expected of them. Conse- 
quently, the system is well established to-day. 
Superintendent is pitted against superintendent, 
foremen against foremen, mill against mill.” 
“In all the speeding up, superintendent and fore- 
man are major factors. If one superintendent 
does not make good, some other can.” The re- 
sult of this system was thus deliberately summed 
up by the distinguished political economist in 
charge of the Pittsburgh investigation before the 
assembled economists of America: “The mass 
of workers in the steel industry are driven as 
large numbers of laborers, whether slave or free, 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


have scarcely before in human history been 
driven.” 

Seeing that such cross comparison of costs is 
a favorite means of the trust for leveling up ef- 
ficiency in its various scattered plants, and see- 
ing that there are seven great industrial trusts 
controlling over sixteen hundred plants and 
three hundred lesser trusts controlling over five 
thousand plants, it is clear that a large and in- 
creasing part of the industry of the country is 
being driven ahead under this savage spur. 

Look, now, at some of the outcroppings of this 
business fallacy in our American life. 


HEROES OF SUCCESS 


If all the blessings are to be had for money 
and if nothing is to be had for nothing, we may 
well idolize those who put dollars into our 
pockets. So the man who pays the salaries and 
wages that keep many families is hailed as the 
chief public benefactor. We will grant him al- 
most anything in the way of free site, free use of 
public property, bonus, tax exemption or tariff 
protection. If his refinery taints the air, if his 
chimneys smut the sky, if his waste poisons our 
streams, we tolerate it. For what if he should 

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COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


get cross and quit? Does he demand the right 
to hire and work as he pleases our children and 
young women? Quick, deny him nothing, he 
might sulk or move to another state! Does he 
object to those union pickets on the street cor- 
ner talking to his strike breakers? Then let 
our bluecoats sweep them out of the street. Hu- 
man rights? Shucks! 

Do we thus admire and coddle those whose 
dividends are in benefits, not cash? The daring 
Surgeon who establishes a new operation, the 
bacteriologist who finds the serum for some 
virulent disease, the experimenter whose table 
Shows the way to the conquest of the air, the 
plant-breeder who creates more luscious va- 
rieties of fruits, the civilizer of a tribe of say- 
ages, the translator of the Bible into a strange 
tongue, the founder of a great social settlement, 
the inventor of a better method of teaching the 
deaf — these, alas, are not the men “who do 
things.” For they give blessings, mere bless- 
ings, not money! 


THE EXPLOITATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES 


Obsessed by the business fallacy, we placed, 
of course, no restriction on the exploitation of 
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CHANGING AMERICA 


the public domain, the heritage of posterity, 
upon which alone can rest our hope of national 
permanence. What if our natural gas was 
riotously used up, and our petroleum, instead of 
being husbanded for our grandchildren, is being 
spread to the four corners of the earth as fast 
as commercial genius can do it! Posterity, 
when it contemplates the dry holes in the ground, 
can reflect that at least we had money to burn. 
What if fifty years will see an end to our an- 
thracite! Did n’t the gay patrons of New York 
restaurants swallow forty thousand quarts of 
champagne last New Year’s Eve? What if, 
in our “ hurry-up ” mining, more coal is wasted 
than is used! Have n’t we more and bigger mil- 
lionaires than any other people? What if we 
are within sixty years of “ good-bye, iron ore! ” 
Were there ever such hotels, such steam yachts, 
such alimonies as ours? On with the dance! 


THE WASTE OF LIFE AND LIMB 


No matter who may be hurt, the maxim of 
business seems to be “ Full steam ahead!” Be- 
fore the recent panic our railroads were killing 
annually in round numbers ten thousand and 
hurting a hundred thousand. One trainman out 

94 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


of eight is injured during the year. Formerly 
- one brakeman out of eighty was killed. Among 
our workers it is estimated that over half a mil- 
lion a year are killed or so maimed as to be 
partially or wholly incapacitated for work. An 
inventor says, “If I produce a device to save 
time, I can sell it readily in twenty places, but 
if I offer an idea for saving life I cannot dispose 
of it at all.” Safety appliances had to be forced 
on the railroads by law, and safety fenders are 
rarely provided for street cars save under com- 
pulsion. In Europe there are ten “ museums of 
security,” where safety appliances are exhibited 
in operation. For years government and so- 
cieties there have been offering prizes to stimu- 
late the invention of such devices. Compared 
with their partly humanized industry, our in- 
dustry shows double the number of casualties it 
ought to show. 

A packer was showing a prominent settlement 
worker about his plant. They entered an inner 
room with double doors and without windows or 
ventilation, the walls and ceiling dripping with 
moisture, where, in a temperature of 38°, fifteen 
young women were trimming hams. The tem- 
perature was carefully kept the same as that 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


of the chilling-room from which the meat came 
and to which it was returned. ‘“ You see we . 
waste nothing here,” he said, “ not even heat.” 
“ Nothing,’ she replied, “but the health of 
girls! ” 


IMMIGRATION 


In thirty years there has been a great shifting 
in the sources of our immigration from North- 
western Europe to Southern and Eastern 
Europe. The newer immigrants are six to ten 
times as illiterate as the older. They come, most 
of them, from practical motives, and, thanks to 
cheaper ocean passage, from humbler strata. 
( Members of stock and races that have been el- 
bowed aside in the swayings of the mightier 
) races, many of them have neither the mental ca- 
pacity nor the stability of character of the West- 
European breeds. 

Who wants this element? Not labor, whom it 
displaces. Not the farmers, who limit their 
families when they see the opportunities that 
ought to be reserved for posterity seized by 
aliens. Not the professional classes, with their 
abhorrence of dirt, disease and disorder. Not 
the fourteen millions already here, most of whom 

96 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


are anxious enough to close the door. Save a 
handful of distinguished humanitarians, _no- 
hody wants them but certain business men — 
the mine-owner, the mill-owner, the contractor, 
the railway people, the steamship companies. 
To give these gentlemen cheap labor or a full 
steerage, the race welfare has, so far, been un- 
hesitatingly sacrificed. 


THE PANDERING INTERESTS 


The commercialization of vice is the key to 
our recent sumptuary history. For vice is 
harder to uproot now that people have ceased to 
gratify their harmful appetites by their own en- 
terprise. Gone is the conversion of peaches into 
brandy, the distilling of rye into whiskey, for 
home consumption. To-day you buy your 
poisons, and every vice has behind it a business 
interest. 

Then, combination has been going on among 
vice-caterers. The saloon keepers are often 
mere agents of the big brewers, the tobacconists 
clerks of the tobacco trust. The prostitute is 
not for herself, but is owned by some “ madam” 
who, in turn, may be under a syndicate that 
maintains a chain of brothels and recruits its 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


girls through an organized and far-reaching 
white slave traffic. 

Thus banded, a pandering interest is far more 
formidable. The preacher, editor, or prosecutor 
who assails a noxious local traffic is amazed to 
behold the forces that line up against him. He 
strikes at a groggery and collides with distant 
brewers, tackles a pool-room and finds himself 
confronted with a telegraph company, aims at a 
bucket-shop and uncovers a syndicate. For the 
village vice-caterer has become the tentacle of 
an octopus. 

Once concentrated, a pandering interest en- 
ters on an aggressive campaign to “ develop busi- 
ness.” By advertising, circulars, posters, and 
free samples, it seeks to recruit new customers, 
especially among the young. Old-time tobacco 
was as inert as maple sugar; but trustified to- 
bacco has been known to tempt boys with cig- 
arettes sold under cost and put up in packages 
containing suggestive pictures to stimulate buy- 
ing. The hard cider of yore was about as push- 
ful as hen’s eggs; but to-day there are decoctions 
that snare the sweat-won dollars from the pock- 
ets of the negro field-hand by an obscene title 
coupled with a picture of a naked white woman 

98 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


on the label. What if this gin does breed rapes 
and lynchings! “ Business is business.” 

Those who would check the insidious moral 
gangrene soon find that, like St. Paul at 
Ephesus, they have collided with a commercial 
interest. For example, a certain society of social 
hygiene issues decent unsensational pamphlets 
of warning against the venereal peril. When 
the society sought to circulate its pamphlets 
in the red-light district policemen interfered 
at first on the ground that they were “hurting 
business ” and “scaring away customers.” Per- 
suade moonshiners from their whiskey, and no- 
body objects; it is not a staple of commerce. 
But lure away patrons from an organized traffic 
and you will have trouble. Essay regulation, 
and you will find the profits from a soul-destroy- 
ing business are just as hard to kill as the profits 
from a legitimate business. Liquor dealers, 
dive-keepers and gamblers will fight righteous 
restrictions just as desperately as haberdashers 
would fight wicked restrictions. And they win 
Sympathizers, too, for, after all, the open vice- 
Shop brings people to town, you know. What 
applause was there on Commercial Street when 
the mayor of O declared in defense of his 

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CHANGING AMERICA 





“lid off” policy. “I want O to be a town 
where a stranger can have some fun! ” 


THE SACRIFICE OF BEAUTY AND QUIET 


Speeding through the solemn wilderness 
traversed by the Canadian Pacific Railway, I 
once saw against a background of shaggy pines 
a colossal sign. “Use Scrubem’s Tooth Pow- 
der.” Had we passengers felt proper resent- 
ment, we would have avoided that tooth powder 
to the end of our days. But, idolators of “en- — 
terprise” that we are, we never think of boy- 
cotting those who fling their business in our 
faces at inopportune moments. In the city every 
accessible spot where the eye may wander fran- 
tically proclaims the merits of somebody’s 
pickles or Scotch whiskey. At night giant il- 
luminated letters notify you of a safety razor, 
flashing and vanishing lights tell of a hair tonic, 
or a beam of living light writes on the sky the 
name of somebody’s malted milk! As you leave 
the city, you behold from the car window effigies 
of animals dotting the meadows and calling at- 
tention to a catsup or a toilet soap. Follow the 
country lane, the forest path or the trout brook, 
and you find fences, barns, trees and boulders 

100 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


shouting to you of pills, fly-sereens and canned 
Soup. All this shameless uglifying sells not a 
penny-worth more of goods and could easily be 
Stopped. Why, then, should a man be allowed 
to violently seize and wrench my attention every 
time I step out of doors, to flash his wares into 
my brain with a sign, or blare them into my ear 
with a band? Simply because, with us, the busi- 
ness man’s eagerness to sell his goods is a sacred 
passion, and nothing may stand in the way of its 
satisfaction. 


POLITICS 


Municipal government is said to be the one 
great political failure of the American people. 
But is it? Is the rottenness in so many cities 
due to the will or the neglect of the citizen? A 
government that expresses the character of the 
masses is liable to be jingoistic, spread-eagle, 
noisy and wasteful. But when you find a gov- 
ernment that is sordid, brutal and corrupt, it 
exists not because of the people, but in spite of 
them. The situation in San Francisco, Phila- 
delphia, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati may show 
that the citizens there are timid and ineffective; 
it does not prove them vicious and venal. 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


But if these wicked city administrations do not 
represent the people, what then, do they repre- 
sent? Why, business, especially certain kinds 
of business. Says Mr. Steffens, “ My gropings 
into the misgovernment of cities have drawn me 
everywhere, but always, always out of politics 
into business. Business started the corruption 
of politics in Pittsburgh, upholds it in Philadel- 
phia, boomed with it in Chicago, and withered 
with its reform, and in New York business 
financed the return of Tammany Hall. Here, 
then, is our guide out of the labyrinth. Not the 
political ring, but big business — that is the crux 
of the situation.” 

Now, it is not surprising that vice-caterers 
should corrupt the police and that franchise- 
seeking corporations should buy councilmen. 
But why should men in a straight, clean busi- 
ness, decent respectable men, pillars of society, 
not hypocrites but good men who by their giv- 
ings have demonstrated their interest in the wel- 
fare of their fellows, “go along” and be silent 
while their city is harried by a ravening pack of 
corruptionists? Is it not that “business” is a 
word to conjure with? Is it not that, so vital 
to the common welfare has it been supposed to 

102 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


be that enterprises should expand freely, that 
good men felt themselves justified in counte- 
nancing any situation demanded by Big Busi- 
ness? 


EDUCATION 


Our education is not commercialized, but is it 
not a fact that all the far-sighted educators are 
worrying lest this new and promising move- 
ment for industrial education be captured by 
men with business ideals and become a device 
for supplying merchants and manufacturers 
with cheap labor skilled at the public expense? 


RELIGION 


Since the parable of the Widow’s Mite reli- 
gion cannot be commercialized, though, to be 
sure, Mr. Rockefeller does hold up the Kingdom 
of Heaven as a field for remunerative invest- 
ment when he tells his Sunday School class, 
“ According as you put something in, the greater 
will be your dividends of salvation.” Neverthe- 
less, the Church senses the business obsession of 
our time and shrinks from taking a stand that 
might bring her into clash with the profits 
mania. For what is the evil the Church de- 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


nounces most uncompromisingly? Why, di- 
vorce! But there is no money in getting di- 
vorced —only alimony. And Sabbath-break- 
ing — how inexorable she is about that —if it 
isn’t too lucrative! Sunday games, sports, ex- 
cursions — all anathema — and college students 
should not be called on to recite on Monday 
mornings lest they be tempted to study on Sun- 
day! But never a remonstrance against the ut- 
ter disappearance of Sunday from the steel in- 
dustry. Then how firmly she insists that “In 
God we trust’ be restored to our coins! But in 
this she has commercial support. Did not the 
pious president of one of the Standard Oil com- 
panies declare to his employees that he would 
confine himself to paper money and checks for 
the rest of his days rather than touch coins un- 
hallowed by the sacred motto? 

On the other hand, how cautious is the 
Church —as an organization—in taking a 
stand that may lift the bristles of a financial 
interest! There is the Behemoth of our time, 
and the Church knows it. She has nerved her- 
self to antagonize certain minor disreputable 
businesses, such as liquor, race-track, and gam- 
bling. But— aside from child labor — has she 

104 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


let drive at a full-grown Business Proposition 
like night work by women, “ speeding up,” the 
eighty-four-hour week, or the waste of life and 
limb in industry? Faithlessness? Cowardice? 
No. Only the natural reluctance of the vase to 
come into collision with the kettle. 


REMEDIES 


I have shown that in unfettered business lurk 
certain bad tendencies which business men are 
Slow to perceive and resist, and that, owing to a 
too-ready acceptance of the views of the com- 
mercial group, Americans frequently permit the 
sacrifice of a non-economic interest when it 
happens to stand in the path of Business. 

What are the remedies? 

Attack the business policy in its citadels — 
in Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce, 
in trade associations and trade journals. It has 
often been observed that in the United States 


commercial pursuits attract a larger share-of 
the national ability than in other countries. For 


this reason one finds among American business 
men an unusual number of big, statesmanlike 
minds capable of grasping and applying the wel- 
fare idea, once it is presented to them. 

105 


CHANGING AMERICA 


Show the impolicy of the people accepting 
meekly the leadership of any single group. 
Once we were led by the clergy, then by the law- 
yers, then by the business men. Each group 
had failings of its own and misled the people 
Sometimes into quicksands and waste places. 
Let the people harken a little less to commer- 
cial magnates and a little more to geologists, 
economists, physicians, teachers, and social 
workers. 

Enlighten the public as to its real and per- 
manent interests. What has already been ac- 
complished along this line is most encouraging. 
For years we have had a President who thinks 
in terms of welfare instead of wealth, a man as 
elemental and, uncommercial as Daniel Boone 
or Davy Crockett, yet withal a scholar, familiar 
with the ideas of the far-sighted thinkers who 
are beseeching people to look at matters from 
the standpoint of society and of posterity. Un- 
der his leadership the people have become 
aroused as to the use of natural resources, the 
conditions of meat-packing, the purity of foods, 
the hygiene of industry, industrial accidents, 
child labor, the protection of the family. 

Organize centers of resistance to the encroach- 

106 


COMMERCIALISM RAMPANT 


ments of the business interests. Associations 
such as the Consumers’ League, the Immigration 
Restriction League, the Anti-Saloon League, the 
Forestry Association, the Child Labor Commit- 
tee, the Women’s Trade Union League, the Na- 
tional Public Health Association, create sound 
public sentiment and focus it at the critical mo- 
ment at the points where it can be most effective. 
If only philanthropists would provide adequate 
funds for their investigation and publicity work, 
these associations might stand more nearly on a 
footing with the greedy interests they are trying 
to balk. 

Combat aggressions on the public welfare by 
creating public commissions provided with ade- 
quate funds, such as fish and game commissions, 
public health boards, pure food commissions, the 
Conservation Commission, and the Country Life 
Commission. 

Finally, install permanent machinery in thé 
form of a corps of trained factory inspectors, 
food inspectors, sanitary agents, health officers, ; 
forest rangers, and the like, animated with the 
professional spirit and devoting themselves to 
carrying out the settled purpose of the commu- 
nity, even after the community has ceased to 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


think about the matter. <Jear not lest Busi 
will turn the tables on these regulators as soon 


as the public looks some other way. Take, for 


example, the newly constituted meat-inspection 


service. If the packers should get their man 
at the head of the Department of Agriculture 
and word should come to the thousand inspectors 


-~Sto “go easy,” what would happen? Would the 


zealous graduates of our veterinary colleges 
ig isease in the car- 


cas liding’ p. it_ti r thei 


? Not at all. They would resign and 
protest in such numbers as to make the chloro- 
forming of the service a blazing national scandal. 

For there forms in your true expert a con- 
science that insists on his really doing the work 


for which he draws the wage. 





108 


VII 
THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


14 Peed of the criticism launched at our daily 

newspapers hits the wrong party. Granted 
they sensationalize vice and crime, “ play up” 
trivialities, exploit the private affairs of promi- 
nent people, embroider facts, and offend good 
taste with screech, blare, and color. But all 
this may be only the means of meeting the de- 
mand, of “giving the publiq what it wants.” 
The newspaper cannot be expected to remain 
dignified and serious now that it caters to the 
common millions, instead of, as formerly, to the 
professional and business classes. To interest 
errand-boy and factory-girl and raw immigrant, 
it had to become spicy, amusing, emotional, and 
chromatic. For these, blame, then, the Ameri- 
can people. 

There is just one deadly, damning count 
against the daily newspaper as it is coming to 
be, namely, [¢ does not give the news. 

For all its pretensions, many a daily news- 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


paper is not “ giving the public what it wants.” 
In spite of these widely trumpeted prodigies of 
costly journalistic ‘ enterprise,” these ferreting 
reporters and hurrying correspondents, these 
leased cables and special trains, news, good 
“live” news, “ red-hot stuff,” is deliberately be- 
ing suppressed or distorted. This occurs oftener 
now than formerly, and bids fair to occur yet 
oftener in the future. 

And this in spite of the fact that the aspira- 
tion of the press has been upward. Venality 
has waned. Better and better men have been 
drawn into journalism, and they have wrought 
under more self-restraint. The time when it 
could be said, as it was said of the Reverend Dr. 
Dodd, that one had “ descended so low as to be- 
come editor of a newspaper,” seems as remote 
as the Ice Age. The editor who uses his paper 
to air his prejudices, satisfy his grudges, and 
serve his private ambitions, is going out. So- 
bered by a growing realization of their social 
function, newspaper men have come under a 
sense of responsibility. Not long ago it seemed 
as if a professional spirit and a professional 
ethics were about to inspire the newspaper 
world; and to this end courses and schools of 

110 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


journalism were established, with high hopes. 
The arrest of this promising movement explains 
why nine out of ten newspaper men of fifteen 
years’ experience are cynics. 

As usual, no one is to blame. The apostasy 
of the daily press is caused by three economic 
developments in the field of newspaper publish- 
ing. 

CAPITALIST-OWNER SUPPLANTS EDITOR-OWNER 


In the first place, the great city daily has be- 
come a blanket sheet with elaborate presswork, 
printed in mammoth editions that must be 
turned out in the least time. The necessary 
plant is so costly, and the Associated Press fran- 
chise is so expensive, that the daily newspaper 
in the big city has become a capitalistic enter- 
prise. To-day a million dollars will not begin 
to outfit a metropolitan newspaper. The editor 
is no longer the owner, for he has not, and can- 
not command, the capital needed to start it or 
buy it. The editor of the type of Greeley, Dana, 
Medill, Story, Halstead, and Raymond, who 
owns his paper and makes it his astral body, 
the projection of his character and ideals, is 
rare. Perhaps Mr. Watterson and Mr. Nelson 

Lie Be 


CHANGING AMERICA 


are the best living representatives of the type. 

More and more the owner of the big daily is 
a business man who finds it hard to see why he 
should run his property on different lines from 
the hotel proprietor, the vaudeville manager, or 
the owner of an amusement park. The editors 
are hired men, and they may put into the paper 
no more of their conscience and ideals than com- 
ports with getting the biggest return from the 
investment. Of course, the old-time editor who 
owned his paper tried to make money,— no sin 
that! — but just as to-day the author, the lec- 
turer, or the scholar tries to make money, 
namely, within the limitations imposed by his 
principles and his professional standards. But, 
now that the provider of the newspaper capital 
hires the editor instead of the editor hiring the 
newspaper capital, the paper is likelier to be 
run aS a money-maker pure and simple —a fac- 
tory where ink and brains are so applied to white 
paper as to turn out the largest possible market- 
able product. The capitalist-owner means no 
harm, but he is not bothered by the standards 
that hamper the editor-owner. He follows a few 
simple maxims that work out well enough in sell- 
ing shoes or cigars or sheet-music. ‘“ Give peo- 

112 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


ple what they want, not what you want.” 
“ Back nothing that will be unpopular.” “ Run 
the concern for all it is worth.” 

This drifting of ultimate control into the 
hands of men with business motives is what is 
known as “the commercialization of the press.” 


ADVERTISING CENSORS THE NEWS 


The significance of it is apparent when you 
consider the second economic development, 
namely, the growth of newspaper advertising. 
The dissemination of news and the purveyance 
of publicity are two essentially distinct fune- 
tions which, for the sake of convenience, are car- 
ried on by the same agency. The one appeals 
to subscribers, the other to advertisers. The 
one calls for good faith, the other does not. The 
one is the corner-stone of liberty and democ- 
racy, the other a convenience of commerce. 
Now, the purveyance of publicity is becoming 
the main concern of the newspaper, and threat- 
ens to throw quite into the shade the communi- 
cation of news or opinions. Every year the 
Sale of advertising yields a larger proportion of 
the total receipts, and the subscribers furnish a 
Smaller proportion. Thirty years ago, adver- 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


tising yielded less than half of the earnings of 
the daily newspapers. To-day, it yields at least 
two-thirds. In the larger dailies the receipts 
from advertisers are several times the receipts 
from the readers, in some cases constituting 
ninety per cent. of the total revenues. As the 
newspaper expands to eight, twelve, and Six- 
teen pages, while the price sinks to three cents, 
two cents, one cent, the time comes when the ad- 
vertisers support the newspaper. The readers 
are there to read, not to provide funds. “He 
who pays the piper calls the tune.” When news- 
columns and editorial page are a mere incident 
in the profitable sale of mercantile publicity, it 
is strictly “business-like ” to let the big adver- 
tisers censor both. 

Of course, you must not let the cat out of the 
bag, or you will lose readers, and thereupon ad- 
vertising. As the publicity expert, Deweese, 
frankly puts it, “The reader must be flim- 
flammed with the idea that the publisher is 
really publishing the newspaper or magazine for 
him.” The wise owner will “ maintain the beau- 
tiful and impressive bluff of running a journal 
to influence public opinion, to purify politics, 
to elevate public morals, ete.” In the last 

114 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


analysis, then, the smothering of faets in def- 
erence to the advertiser finds a limit in the intel- 
ligence and alertness of the reading public. 
Handled as “a commercial proposition,” the 
newspaper dares not suppress such news beyond 
a certain point, and it can always proudly point 
to the unsuppressed news as proof of its inde- 
pendence and public spirit. 


THE LENGTHENING PHALANX OF ADVERTISERS 


The immunity enjoyed by the big advertiser 
becomes more serious as more kinds of business 
resort to advertising. Formerly, readers who 
understood why accidents and labor troubles 
never occur in department stores, why dramatic 
criticisms are so lenient, and the reviews of 
books from the publishers who advertise are so 
good-natured, could still expect from their jour- 
nal an ungloved freedom in dealing with gas, 
electric, railroad, and banking companies. But 
now the gas people advertise, “ Cook with gas,” 
the electric people urge you to put your sewing- 
machine on their current, and the railroads spill 
oceans of ink to attract settlers or tourists. The 
banks and trust companies are buyers of space, 
investment advertising has sprung up like 

115 


CHANGING AMERICA 


Jonah’s gourd, and telephone and traction com- 
panies are being drawn into the vortex of com- 
petitive publicity. Presently, in the news- 
columns of the sheet that steers by the cash-reg- 
ister, every concern that has favors to seek, 
duties to dodge, or regulations to evade, will be 
able to press the soft pedal. | | 


THE ‘‘ KEPT’? NEWSPAPER 


A third development is the subordination of 
newspapers to other enterprises. After a news- 
paper becomes a piece of paying property, de- 
tachable from the editor’s personality, which 
may be bought and sold like a hotel or mill, it 
may come into the hands of those who will hold 
it in bondage to other and bigger investments. 
The magnate-owner may find it to his advantage 
not to run it as a newspaper pure and simple, 
but to make it—on the sly —an instrument 
for coloring certain kinds of news, diffusing 
certain misinformation, or fostering certain im- 
pressions or prejudices in-its clientéle. In a 
word, he may shape its policy by non-journalistic 
considerations. By making his paper help his 
other schemes, or further his political or social — 
ambitions, he will hurt it as a money-maker, no 

116 . 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


doubt, but he may contrive to fool enough of the 
people enough of the time. Aside from such 
thraldom, newspapers are subject to the 
tendency of diverse businesses to become 
tied together by the cross-investments of 
their owners. But naturally, when the shares 
of a newspaper lie in the safe-deposit box cheek 
by jowl with gas, telephone, and pipe-line stock, 
a tenderness for these collateral interests is likely 
to affect the news-columns. 


“ KILLING ’? IMPORTANT NEWS 


That in consequence of its commercialization, 
and its frequent subjection to outside interests, 
the daily newspaper is constantly suppressing 
important news, will appear from the instances 
that follow. They are hardly a third of the ma- 
terial that has come to the writer’s attention. 

A prominent Philadelphia clothier visiting 
New York was caught perverting boys, and cut 
his throat. His firm being a heavy advertiser, 
not a single paper in his home city mentioned 
the tragedy. One New York paper took ad- 
vantage of the situation by sending over an ex- 
tra edition containing the story. The firm in 
question has a large branch in a Western city. 

Dy 


CHANGING AMERICA 


There too the local press was silent, and the 
opening was seized by a Chicago paper. 

In this same Western city the vice-president 
of this firm was indicted for bribing an alder- 
man to secure the passage of an ordinance au- 
thorizing the firm to bridge an alley separating 
two of its buildings. Representatives of the firm 
requested the newspapers in which it advertised 
to ignore the trial. Accordingly the five Eng- 
lish papers published no account of the trial, 
which lasted a week and disclosed highly sensa- 
tional matter. Only the German papers sent re- 
porters to the trial and published the proceed- 
ings. 

In a great jobbing center, one of the most 
prominent cases of the United States District 
Attorney was the prosecution of certain firms 
for misbranding goods. The facts brought out 
appeared in the press of the smaller centers, but 
not a word was printed in the local papers. In 


another center, four firms were fined for selling — 


potted cheese which had been treated with pre- 
servatives. The local newspapers stated the { 
facts, but withheld the names of the firms, a con- 
sideration they are not likely to show to the or- 
dinary culprit. 

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THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


In a trial in a great city it was brought out by 
sworn testimony that, during a recent labor 
struggle which involved teamsters on the one 
hand and the department stores and the mail- 
order houses on the other, the employers had 
plotted to provoke the strikers to violence by 
sending a long line of strike-breaking wagons 
out of their way to pass a lot on which the strik- 
ers were meeting. These wagons were the bait 
to a trap, for a strong force of policemen was 
held in readiness in the vicinity, and the gov- 
ernor of the state was at the telephone ready to 
call out the militia if a riot broke out. TF ortu- 
nately, the strikers restrained themselves, and 
the trap was not sprung. It is easy to imagine 
the headlines that would have been used if labor 
had been found in so diabolical a plot. Yet the 
newspapers unanimously refused to print this 
testimony. 

In the same city, during a strike of the ele- 
vator men in the large stores, the business agent 
of the elevator-starters’ union was beaten to 
death, in an alley behind a certain emporium, 
by a “strong-arm” man hired by that firm. 
The story, supported by affidavits, was given by 
a responsible lawyer to three newspaper men, 

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‘ CHANGING AMERICA 


each of whom accepted it as true and promised 
to print it. The account never appeared. 

In another city the sales-girls in the big shops 
had to sign an exceedingly mean and oppressive 
contract which, if generally known, would have 
made the firms odious to the public. A promi- 
nent social worker brought these contracts, and 
evidence as to the bad conditions that had be- 
come established under them, to every newspaper 
in the city. Not one would print a line on the 
subject. 

On the outbreak of a justifiable street-car 
Strike the newspapers were disposed to treat it 
in a sympathetic way. Suddenly they veered, 
and became unanimously hostile to the strikers. 
Inquiry showed that the big merchants had 
threatened to withdraw their advertisements un- 
less the newspapers changed their attitude. 

In the summer of 1908 disastrous fires raged 
in the northern Lake country, and great areas 
of standing timber were destroyed. A promi- 
nent organ of the lumber industry belittled the 
losses and printed reassuring statements from 
lumbermen who were at the very moment call- 
ing upon the state for a fire patrol. When 
taxed with the deceit, the organ pleaded its ob- 

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THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


ligation to support the market for the bonds 
which the lumber companies of the Lake region 
had been advertising in its columns. 

On account of agitating for teachers’ pen- 
sions, a teacher was summarily dismissed by a 
corrupt school-board, in violation of their own 
published rule regarding tenure. An influential 
newspaper published the facts of school-board 
erafting brought out in the teacher’s suit for re- 
instatement until, through his club affiliations, 
a big merchant was induced to threaten the 
paper with the withdrawal of his advertising. 
No further reports of the revelations appeared. 

During labor disputes the facts are usually 
distorted to the injury of labor. In one case, 
strikers held a meeting on a vacant lot enclosed 
by a newly-erected billboard. Forthwith ap- 
peared, in a yellow journal professing warm 
friendship for labor, a front-page cut of the bill- 
board and a lurid story of how the strikers had 
built a “ stockade,” behind which they intended 
to bid defiance to the bluecoats. It is not sur- 
prising that when the van bringing these lying 
sheets appeared in their quarter of the city, the 
libeled men overturned it. 

During the struggle of carriage-drivers for a 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


six-day week, certain great dailies lent them- 
selves to a concerted effort of the liverymen to 
win public sympathy by making it appear that 
the strikers were interfering with funerals. One 
paper falsely stated that a strong force of police 
was being held in reserve in case of “ riots,” and 
that policemen would ride beside the non-union 
drivers of hearses. Another, under the mis- 
leading headline, “Two Funerals Stopped by 
Striking Cab-men,” described harmless colloquies 
between hearse-drivers and pickets. This was 
followed up with a solemn editorial, “ May a 
Man go to his Long Rest in Peace?” although, 
as a matter of fact, the strikers had no intention 
of interfering with funerals. 

The lying headline is a favorite device for mis- 
leading the reader. One sheet prints on its front 
page a huge “scare” headline, “* Hang Hay- 
wood and a Million Men will March in Re- 
venge,’ says Darrow.” The few readers whose 
glance fell from the incendiary headline to the 
dispatch below it found only the following: 
“Mr. Darrow, in closing the argument, said that 
‘if the jury hangs Bill Haywood, one million 
willing hands will seize the banner of liberty by 
the open grave, and bear it on to victory.’” In 

122 





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THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


the same style, a dispatch telling of the death of 
an English policeman, from injuries received 
during a riot precipitated by suffragettes at- 
tempting to enter a hall during a political meet- 
ing, is headed, “Suffragettes kill Policeman! ” 


‘“ PROSPERITY DOPE ” 


The alacrity with which many dailies serve 
as mouthpieces of the financial powers came out 
very clearly during the recent industrial de- 
pression. The owner of one leading newspaper 
called his reporters together and said in effect, 
“ Boys, the first of you who turns in a story of 
a lay-off or a shut-down, gets the sack.” Early 
in the depression the newspapers teemed with 
glowing accounts of the resumption of steel 
mills and the revival of business, all baseless. 
After harvest time they began to cheep, “ Pros- 
perity,’ “Bumper Crops,” “ Farmers buying 
Automobiles.” In cities where banks and em- 
ployers offered clearing-house certificates instead 
of cash, the press usually printed fairy tales of 
the enthusiasm with which these makeshifts were 
taken by depositors and workingmen. The 
numbers and sufferings of the unemployed 
were ruthlessly concealed from the reading pub- 

123 


CHANGING AMERICA 


lic. A mass meeting of men out of work was 
represented as “ anarchistic ” or “ instigated by 
the socialists for political effect.” In one daily 
appeared a dispatch under the heading “ Five 
Thousand Jobs Offered; only Ten apply.” It 
stated that the Commissioner of Public Works 
of Detroit, misled by reports of dire distress, set 
afoot a public work which called for five thou- 
sand men. Only ten men applied for work, and 
all these expected to be bosses. Correspondence 
with the official established the fact that the 
number of jobs offered was five hundred, and 
that three thousand men applied for them! 


“ SACRED COWS ” 


On the desk of every editor and sub-editor of 
a newspaper run by a capitalist promoter now 
under prison sentence lay a list of sixteen cor- 
porations in which the owner was interested. 
This was to remind them not to print anything 
damaging to these concerns. In the office these 
corporations were jocularly referred to as 
“ sacred cows.” 

Nearly every form of privilege is found in 
the herd of “sacred cows” venerated by the 
daily press. 

124 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


The railroad company is a “ sacred cow.” At 
a hearing before a state railroad commission, 
the attorney of a shippers’ association got an 
eminent magnate into the witness chair, with 
the intention of wringing from him the truth re- 
garding the political expenditures of his rail- 
road. At this point the commission, an abject 
creature of the railroads, arbitrarily excluded 
the daring attorney from the case. The mem- 
orable excoriation which that attorney gave the 
commission to its face was made to appear in the 
papers as the cause instead of the consequence 
of this exclusion. Subsequently, when the at- 
torney filed charges with the governor against 
the commission, one editor wrote an editorial 
stating the facts and criticizing the commission- 
ers. The editorial was suppressed after it was 
in type. 

The public-service company is a “ sacred cow.” 
In a city of the Southwest, last summer, while 
houses were burning from lack of water for the 
fire hose, a lumber company offered to supply 
the firemen with water. The water company re- 
plied that they had “sufficient.” Neither this 
nor other damaging information concerning the 
company’s conduct got into the columns of the 

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CHANGING AMERICA 


local press. A yellow journal conspicuous in the 
fight for cheaper gas by its ferocious onslaughts 
on the “ gas trust,’ suddenly ceased its attack. 
Soon it began to carry a full-page “ Cook with 
gas” advertisement. The cow had found the en- 
trance to the sacred fold. 

Traction is a “sacred cow.” The truth about 
Cleveland’s fight for the three-cent fare has been 
widely suppressed. For instance, while Mayor 
Johnson was superintending the removal of the 
tracks of a defunct street railway, he was served 
with a court order enjoining him from tearing 
up the rails. As the injunction was not in- 
dorsed, as by law it should be, he thought it was 
an ordinary communication, and put it in his 
pocket to examine later. The next day he was 
summoned to show reason why he should not be 
found in contempt of court. When the facts 
came out, he was, of course, discharged. An 
examination of the seven leading dailies of the 
country shows that a dispatch was sent out 
from Cleveland stating that Mayor Johnson, 
after acknowledging service, pocketed the in- 
junction, and ordered his men to proceed with 
their work. In the newspaper offices this dis- 
patch was then embroidered. One paper said 

126 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


the mayor told his men to go ahead and ignore 
the injunction. Another had the mayor inti- 
mating in advance that he would not obey an or- 
der if one were issued. A third invented a con- 
versation in which the mayor and his superin- 
tendent made merry over the injunction. Not 
one of the seven journals reported the mayor’s 
complete exoneration later. 

The tax system is a “sacred cow.” During a 
banquet of two hundred single-taxers, at the con- 
clusion of their state conference, a man fell ina 
fit. Reporters saw the trifling incident, yet the 
morning papers, under big headlines, “ Many 
poisoned at Single-Tax Banquet,” told in detail 
how a large number of banqueters had been 
ptomaine-poisoned. The conference had formu- 
lated a single-tax amendment to the state con- 
stitution, which they intended to present to the 
people for signature under the new Initiative 
Law. One paper gave a line and a half to this 
most significant action. No other paper noticed 
it. 

The party system is a “sacred cow.” When 
a county district court declared that the Initi- 
ative and Referendum amendment to the Oregon 
constitution was invalid, the item was spread 

127 


CHANGING AMERICA 


broadcast. But when later the Supreme Court 
of Oregon reversed that decision, the fact was 
too trivial to be put on the wires. , 

The “ man higher up” is a “sacred cow.” In 
reporting Prosecutor Heney’s argument in the 
Calhoun case, the leading San Francisco paper 
omitted everything on the guilt of Calhoun and 
made conspicuous certain statements of Mr. 
Heney with reference to himself, with intent to 
make it appear that his argument was but a vin- 
dication of himself, and that he made no points 
against the accused. The argument for the de- 
fense was printed in full, the “ points” being 
neatly displayed in large type at proper inter- 
vals. Ata crisis in this prosecution a Washing- 
ton dispatch quoted the chairman of the Appro- 
priations Committee as stating in the House that 
“Mr. Heney received during 1908 $23,000, for 
which he performed no service whatever for the 
Government.” It was some hours before the re- 
port was corrected by adding Mr. Tawney’s con- 
cluding words, “ during that year.” 

In view of their suppression and misrepre- 
sentation of vital truth, the big daily papers, 
broadly speaking, must be counted as allies of 
those whom —as Editor Dana reverently put 

128 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


it —“ God has endowed with a genius for sav- 
ing, for getting rich, for bringing wealth to- 
gether, for accumulating and concentrating 
money.” In rallying to the side of the people 
they are slower than the weeklies, the magazines, 
the pulpit, the platform, the bar, the literati, 
the intellectuals, the social settlements, and the 
universities. 


HOW A VOX CLAMANTIS BECOMES PROPERTY 


Now and then, to be sure, in some betrayed 
and misgoverned city, a man of force takes some 
little sheet, prints all the news, ventilates the 
local situation, arouses the community, builds 
up a huge circulation, and proves that truth-tell- 
ing still pays. But such exploits do not counter- 
act the economic developments which have 
brought on the glacial epoch in journalism. 
Note what happens later to such a newspaper. 
It is now a valuable property, and as such it will 
be treated. The editor need not repeat the bold 
strokes that won public confidence; he has only 
to avoid anything that would forfeit it. Uncon- 
Sciously he becomes, perhaps, less a newspaper 
man, more a business man. He may make in- 
vestments which muzzle his paper here, form 

129 


CHANGING AMERICA 


Social connections which silence it there. He 
may tire of fighting and want to “cash in.” In 
any case, when his newspaper falls into the hands 
of others, it will be run as a business, and not as 

a crusade. ) 


WILL NEWS “ out”? 


What can be done about the suppression of 
news? At least, we can refrain from arraign- 
ing and preaching. To urge the editor, under 
the thumb of the advertiser or of the owner, to 
be more independent, is to invite him to remove 
himself from his profession. As for the capital- 
ist-owner, to exhort him to run his newspaper in 
the interests of truth and progress is about as 
reasonable as to exhort the mill-owner to work 
his property for the public good instead of for 
his private benefit. 

What is needed is a broad new avenue to the 
public mind. Already smothered facts are cut- 
ting little channels for themselves. The im- 
mense vogue of the “ muck-raking” magazines 
is due to their being vehicles for suppressed 
news. Non-partizan leaders are meeting with 
cheering response when they found weeklies in 
order to reach their natural following. The So- 

130 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


cialist Party supports two dailies, less to spread 
their ideas than to print what the capitalistic 
dailies would stifle. Civic associations, munici- 
pal voters’ leagues, and legislative voters’ 
leagues, are circulating tons of leaflets and bul- 
letins full of suppressed facts. Within a year five 
cities have, with the taxpayers’ money, started 
journals to acquaint the citizens with municipal 
happenings and affairs. In many cities have 
sprung up private non-partizan weeklies to re- 
port civic information. Moreover, the spoken 
word is once more a power. The demand for 
lecturers and speakers is insatiable, and the plat- 
form bids fair to recover its old prestige. The 
smotherers are dismayed by the growth of the 
Chautauqua circuit. Congressional speeches 
give vent to boycotted truth, and circulate widely 
under the franking privilege. City clubs and 
Saturday lunch clubs are formed to listen to 
facts and ideas tabooed by the daily press. More 
is made of public hearings before committees of 
councilmen or legislators. 

When all is said, however, the defection of the 
daily press has been a staggering blow to de- 
mocracy. 


131 


CHANGING AMERICA 


THE NEED OF THE ENDOWED NEWSPAPER 


Many insist that the public is able to recog- 
nize and pay for the truth. “Trust the pub- 
lic” and in the end merit will be rewarded. 
Time and again men have sunk money in Start- 
ing an honest and outspoken sheet, confident 
that soon the public would rally to its support. 
But such hopes are doomed to disappointment. 
The editor who turns away bad advertising or 
defies his big patrons cannot lay his copy on the 
subscriber’s doorstep for as little money as the 
editor who purveys publicity for all it is worth; 
and the masses will not pay three cents when an- 
other paper that “looks just as good” can be 
‘had fora cent. Ina word, the art of simulating 
honesty and independence has outrun the insight 
of the average reader. 

To conclude that the people are not able to 
recognize and pay for the truth about current 
happenings simply puts the dissemination of 
news in a class with other momentous social 
services. Because people fail to recognize and 
pay for good books, endowed libraries stud the 
land. Because they fail to recognize and pay 
for good instruction, education is provided free 

132 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


or at part cost. Just as the moment came when 
it was seen that private schools, loan libraries, 
commercial parks, baths, gymnasia, athletic 
grounds, and play-grounds would not answer, so 
the moment is here for recognizing that the com- 
mercial news medium does not adequately meet 
the needs of democratic citizenship. 

Endowment is necessary, and, since we are not 
yet wise enough to run a public-owned daily 
newspaper, the funds must come from private 
sources. In view of the fact that in fifteen years 
large donations aggregating more than a thou- 
Sand million of dollars have been made for pub- 
lic purposes in this country, it is safe to predict 
that, if the usefulness of a non-commercial news- 
paper be demonstrated, funds will be forthcom- 
ing. In the cities, where the secret control i 
the channels of publicity is easiest, there are} 
likely to be founded financially a, 
newspapers, the gift of public-spirited men_of 
wealth. ids 


THE CONTROL OF THE ENDOWED NEWSPAPER 


The ultimate control of such a foundation 

Ae Spee ee Sapiens, —_ 

constitutes a problem. A newspaper free to ig- 

hore the threats of big advertisers or powerful 
133 


CHANGING AMERICA 


interests, one not to be bought, bullied, or 
bludgeoned, one that might at any moment blurt 
out the damning truth about police protection 
to vice, corporate tax-dodging, the grabbing of 
water frontage by railroads, or the non-enforce- 
ment of the factory laws, would be of such 
strategic importance in the struggle for wealth 
that desperate efforts would be made to chloro- 
form it. If its governing board perpetuated it- 
self by co-optation, it would eventually be packed 
with “safe” men, who would see to it that the 
newspaper was run in a “ conservative” spirit; 
for, in the long run, those who can watch for an 
advantage all the time will beat the people, who 
can watch only some of the time. 

Chloroformed the endowed newspaper will be, 
unless it be committed to the onward thought 
and conscience of the community. This could 
be done by letting vacancies on the governing 
board be filled in turn by the local bar associa-— 
tion, the medical association, the ministers’ 
union, the degree-granting faculties, the feder- 
ated teachers, the central labor union, the cham- 
ber of commerce, the associated charities, the 
public libraries, the non-partizan citizens’ asso- 
ciations, the improvement leagues, and the social 

134 


THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS 


settlements.. In this way the endowment would 
rest ultimately on the chief apexes of moral and 
intellectual worth in the city. 


THE SERVICES OF THE ENDOWED NEWSPAPER 


While giving, with headline, cut, and cartoon, 
the interesting news,— forgeries and accidents, 
Society and sports, as well as business and poli- 
tics,— the endowed newspaper would not drama- 
tize crime, or gossip of private affairs; above all, 
it would not “ fake,” “ doctor,” or sensationalize 
the news. Too self-respecting to use keyhole 
tactics, and too serious to chronicle the small 
beer of the wedding trousseau or the divorce 
court, such a newspaper could not begin to match 
the commercial press in circulation. But it 
would reach those who reach the public through 
the weeklies and monthlies, and would inform 
the teachers, preachers, lecturers, and NS 
men, who speak to the people eye to eye. 

What is more, it would be a@ corrective news- 
paper, giving a wholesome leverage for lifting 
up the commercial press. The big papers would 
not dare be caught smothering or “ cooking ” the 
hews. The revelations of an independent jour- 
nal that everybody believed, would be a terror to 

135 ' 


CHANGING AMERICA 


them, and, under the spur of a competitor not 
to be frightened, bought up, or tired out, they 
must needs, in sheer self-preservation, tell the 
truth much oftener than they do. The Erie 
Canal handles less than a twentieth of the traffic 
across the State of New York, yet, by its stand- 
ing offer of cheap transportation, it exerts a reg- 
ulative pressure on railway rates which is real- 
ized only when the canal opens in the spring. 
On the same principle, the endowed newspaper 
in a given city might print only a twentieth of 
the daily press output and yet exercise over the 
other nineteen-twentieths an influence great and 
salutary. 


136 


VIII 
THE MIDDLE WEST—THE FIBER OF THE PEOPLE 


N these days of change, by the time a national 

trait has come to be generally recognized it 
has vanished. The school geographies insist 
that the French are “gay”; in point of fact, 
they have become in the last forty years a very 
Serious people. The world thinks of the Brit- 
ish as “stolid”; but, since Mafeking night, 
these same British seem to have turned demon- 
strative, almost mercurial. We go on thinking 
of the Germans as cautious and sluggish, 
whereas, actually, they are daring and energetic. 

So is it with sectional traits. By the time 
some impression about the West has sunk deep 
into the Eastern mind, the West has swept on- 
ward and falsified it. The Yankee thinks of the 
Middle West as the land of privation and hard- 
Ship ; it is, in fact, a scene of comfort and plenty. 
He regards it as peopled by a hodgepodge of 
aliens, whereas the hodgepodge is at his own 

137 


CHANGING AMERICA 


door. He looks upon New England as the ref- 
uge of the primal American spirit, when, in 
sooth, Iowa and Kansas are more evenly Ameri- 
can in tone than any like population in the Hast. 
The Back Bay may think of the Illinois farmer 
as raising corn to feed hogs, which he will sell 
in order to buy more land on which to raise more 
corn to feed more hogs with which to buy 
more land; and so on. But the grandson of 
the man of whom this was said sends his daugh- 
ter to college, taxes himself for a public 
library, and is patron of the local art-loan ex- 
hibit. 

Nor is the Middle West without its delusions. 
It imagines it is growing faster than the East, 
because the drift from the crowd toward the 
Edge of Things, and from the wearied land to 
the virgin soils, has been a constant in American 
history. That the center of population, which 
has traveled westward at the average rate of 
fifty miles a decade, should halt, or even retreat, 
would be deemed a marvel, like the sun standing 
still in the vale of Ajalon. Yet that very por- 
tent impends. The center, which migrated fifty- 
eight miles in the seventies, and forty-eight miles 
in the eighties, shifted only fourteen miles in 

138 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


the nineties. That it then moved on thirty-one 
miles was due to the rush to the Pacific slope, 
where a family, being at the long arm of the 
lever, balances half a dozen Slovak families 
shantied in Pittsburgh. 

The truth is that the East grew faster than 
the Middle West through the nineties, and in 
the last ten years it has been gaining nearly 
twice as rapidly, having added a quarter to its 
people while the West was adding a seventh. 
While in the East one county out of four 
lost in population, more than two counties 
out of five in the Middle West showed a de- 
crease. 


THE NEW BLOOD OF THE WEST — WHERH IT COMES 
FROM 


One reason is that the Western farmer resents 
cramping conditions more strongly, and responds 
sooner to the lure of fresh acres, than the East- 
ern farmer. The West it is that peoples the 
newer West, while the enterprising spirits of the 
older commonwealths seek their chance in the 
near cities. A lifetime ago the old Yankee stock 
was faring overland to settle the wilderness. 
To-day only a sprinkling of the native Ameri- 

139 


CHANGING AMERICA 


cans west of the Great Lakes claim an Hastern 
State as their birthplace. If in Iowa seventy- 
one counties out of ninety-nine have gone back 
in population during the last decade, and an 
equal number in Missouri, it is assuredly not 
from bad times, but from the call of cheap land 
in Texas or the Canadian Northwest. 

New Englanders and Middle State people 
settled freely from the Western Reserve to the 
Mississippi. But the men from this area settled 
Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, and thence over- 
flowed into Oklahoma and Colorado. Ohio, Wis- 
consin, and Illinois provided the bulk of the 
American element in Minnesota, and she in turn 
pours most of her increase into the region be- 
yond. East and Middle West are not far apart 
in numbers; but since 1860, Colorado has drawn 
from two to three times as many of her people 
from the Middle West as from the East. In 
North Dakota, in 1900, five times as many peo- 
ple hailed from west of Pittsburgh as from east 
of it; in South Dakota, five times as many; in 
Washington, three times as many; in Oklahoma, 
eighteen times aS many. 

While the West is even now being tapped by 
‘“ home-seekers’ excursions,’ which annually 

140 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


carry nearly half a million west-bound through 
Minneapolis, Omaha, and Kansas City, the East 
is soaking up the new immigration like a dry 
sponge. 

From thirty to forty years ago, great numbers 
of Germans, Scandinavians, Mennonites, Poles, 
Bohemians, and even Icelanders, landing at Castle 
Garden, journeyed straight through, with a rail- 
road-ticket pinned to the shoulder, and within a 
year they were settled on government land. To- 
day the still virgin lands lie beyond the ken of 
the insweeping tides from southern Europe and 
the Orient, dreaming of jobs rather than of 
farms. Of these aliens, in their first crudeness, 
the East gets nearly three times as many as it 
should in comparison with the Middle West. 


THH UNDERSTATURED IMMIGRANTS 


A generation ago the traveler from the valley 
of the Connecticut or the Mohawk was offended 
by the peasant look of many a settlement beyond 
Chicago. To-day this new immigration, which 
has Constantinople as its geographical center, is 
So alien, so ignorant, and so helpless, that it 
takes refuge in the first industrial harbors or 
bays it finds. The huge, pregnant, intimidating 

141 


CHANGING AMERICA 


fact of our time is the progressive saturation of 
the Northeast with these understatured new- 
comers, who have no intention whatever of seek- 
ing the few remaining fragments of the frontier, 
— Idaho, the “short-grass”’ country, the Texas 
Panhandle, or the cut-over pine lands of the 
Northwest,— which remind us that Volume I of 
American history is not yet ended. 

A recent leisurely drive through Connecticut 

prompts Mr. Poultney Bigelow to remark: 
“The overwhelming majority of those we saw 
by the roadside were Italians. . . . They 
cannot yet speak English nor can the hundreds 
of Slavonians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Poles, 
Rumanians, Syrians, and Bulgarians who seem 
to stand sentry at every cross-road where we 
yearned for some one of English speech from 
whom we might extract information. 
To find the children of those whose homes rep- 
resent the ruins of modern Connecticut, follow 
me into the slums of Boston, New York, or 
Chicago, or into the hundreds of equally un- 
savory factory towns that blot the landscape of 
this otherwise beautiful State.” 

Not scattered as in the flush days of free 
land, but marshaled in gangs of miners, shovel- 

142 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


ers, or concrete-mixers, or lodged in certain 
pockets,— a Ghetto, a Little Italy, or Little 
Hungary, or Little Armenia,— the later aliens 
form, as it were, insoluble clots. Few venture 
far inland in their raw state. Those who filter 
through the industrial mesentery to the remote 
farming regions are already half Americanized 
and are readily absorbed into the democratic 
Society of the West. This is why its proportion 
of illiterate foreign-born men is less than half 
as great as that of the East. 

As fresh coal in a furnace sends up the steam- 
gage, so the automatic stoker at Ellis Island 
charges the vicinity with a cheap labor that is 
filling southern New England and the Middle 
States with dumps, coal-breakers, canneries, 
Sky-scrapers, wharves, subways, barge canals, 
and metaled roads. It is also clinching their hold 
on manufacturing industries and postponing 
that proximity of factory to farm which is the 
dream of every Western town. While insisting 
masterfully on its tariff protection, this region, 
which in the late eighties was gloomily listing 
its abandoned farms, now sees its export trade 
Spring up like Jonah’s gourd, smiles at the 
West’s endeavor to get mills of its own, and 

| 143 


CHANGING AMERICA 


does not mind sending sheaves of its “ commer- 
cial paper” to be rediscounted by Western 
banks. 


DIVERGENCES IN THE AMERICAN STOCK 


There is another basis of divergence between 
the sections. The American stock in the Mid- 
dle West is not altogether of the same type as 
the American stock in the East. 

On the physical side the evidence ig strong. 
Dr. Gould’s tabulation of the measurements of 
soldiers by the Sanitary Commission during the 
Civil War shows that the men from New Eng- 
land weighed 139.4 Ibs., those from the Middle 
States 141 lbs., those from Ohio and Indiana 
145.4 lbs., and the men from Michigan, Mis- 
souri, and Illinois 141.8 lbs. The last figure may 
reflect the dyspepsia which troubled the native 
volunteers much more than the foreign-born and 
which raged with special virulence in the newer 
regions, where people had not yet ceased to live 
on “hog and hominy.” From New England the 
proportion of tall men in a thousand was 295; 
from the Middle States, 2837; from Ohio and In- 
diana, 486; and from Michigan, Illinois, and 
Missouri, 466. The chest expansion rose from 

144 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


2.6 in New Englanders to 3.25 in the men from 
the West. 

Even to-day the makers of ready-made cloth- 
ing note a slight tendency toward larger sizes 
in the West, and observe that the Western man 
is generally broader than the Eastern man. 


WHY MEN WENT WEST 


A hundred years ago the Rev. Timothy 
Dwight commented complacently on the benefit 
to Connecticut from the draining away to the 
frontier — then western New York—of the 
restless spirits who chafed under the rule of the 
old families and the Congregational clergy. It 
never occurred to him that these insurgent 
spirits were carrying with them to the wilder- 
ness a precious energy and initiative. 

The unprosperous, the shiftless, and the mi- 
gratory sought the frontier, to be sure; but the 
enterprising, too, were attracted by it. The 
timorous and cautious stayed and accepted the 
cramping conditions of an old society; but those 
who dared take chances, to “place a bet on 
themselves,’ were apt to catch the Western 
.fever. Among the sons and grandsons of such 
risk-takers the venturesome temper cropped out 

145 


CHANGING AMERICA 


much oftener than among the sons and grand- 
sons of the stay-at-homes. Hence, the strange 
fact that it was the roomy West that settled the 
farther West. On each new frontier have 
swarmed men from what was itself frontier only 
a generation earlier. 

During the hundred years required to settle 
the country from the Alleghanies to the Rock- 
ies, the venturing spirit became visibly intensi- 
fied in the Americans of the interior. Less and 
less provocation was needed to make a man pull 
up stakes and head for the open country in a 
covered wagon. The stalwart youth spurned his 
natal spot as “too crowded” when, in fact, it 
was full of every opportunity save that of free 
land. In the last Westernmost decanting of 
the pioneering breed, courage and love of inde- 
pendence reach their greatest intensity. To-day 
in the recesses of the Rocky Mountains you come 
upon steady-eyed, eagle-faced men with tawny 
mustaches, whose masterful, unswerving will 
and fierce impatience of restraint remind you of 
their spiritual kinsmen, the heroes of the Ice- 
landic sagas. 


146 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


A COMPARISON FROM THE CIVIL WAR 


The fiber of the pioneering breed comes out 
in a remarkable way in the stubbornness and 
extraordinary willingness to take punishment 
Shown by our soldiers in the Civil War. On 
comparing the average losses of troops in great 
modern wars we get this table: 

For the twelve principal battles of the Seven 
Years’ War, victors 14 per cent., defeated 19 per 
cent. 

For the twenty-two principal battles of the 
Napoleonic epoch, victors 12 per cent., defeated 
19 per cent. 

For the four principal battles of the Crimean 
War, victors 10 per cent., defeated 17 per cent. 

For the four principal battles of the Franco- 
Austrian War, victors 8 per cent., defeated 8.5 
per cent. 

For the six principal battles of the Austro- 
Prussian War, victors 7 per cent., defeated 9 
per cent. 

For the eight principal battles of the Franco- 
Prussian War, victors 10 per cent., defeated 9 
_ per cent. 

For the twelve principal battles of our Civil 
147 


CHANGING AMERICA 


War, the losses of the Union Army amounted to 
19.7 per cent., and those of the Confederate 
Army to 19.6 per cent. 

The comparison suggests that two centuries | 
of frontier selections may have gradually built 
up in the Americans a peculiar strength of will, 
a trait which presumably retains its greatest 
freshness and vigor in those who have followed 
farthest the migrating frontier. 


WESTERN SELF-RESPECT AND INDEPENDENCE 


In the pioneer blood lurks, too, a secret horror 
of taking another man’s orders or pay. The man 
borderers despise is not the wight who is poor 
or out-at-elbows, but the man who for a wage 
Submits himself to another’s will. They regard 
the negro menial as sent by Providence to ren- 
der necessary services no real man will under- 
take, and they marvel that in older communities 
are to be found white men who will serve as 
waiter, porter, or boot-black. I have heard 
sturdy farm-lads wish they might once gaze upon 
a valet or footman, “ just to see how that sort of 
fellow would look.” 

“Why,” I asked the Master of the National 
Grange, “is the Grange so much stronger in the 

148 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


Hast than in the West?” Because,” came the 
reply, “the social advantages of the Grange ap- 
peal much more to the Eastern farmer than to 
the Western. The Western farmer is absorbed 
in making money.” 

His mind has run to crops and bullocks, and 
Some take it as proof that he is sordid. But 
there is another way of looking at it. The 
Westerner’s willingness to give up home, neigh- 
bors, and old associations for the sake of a 
“claim” on the prairie is not sordid. His stern 
preoccupation with “getting ahead” is a part 
of his inherited passion for personal independ- 
ence. I have seen a gray hue steal over the face 
of the settler when speaking of some one who 
had “lost his farm” and “had to go out by the 
day.” For the wage-earner’s lot the true-born 
Westerner feels a dread quite incomprehensible 
to cities and to old communities. If he ruth- 
lessly sacrifices comforts and culture, it is that 
he may win a footing of his own and so call no 
man master. 

Once he has cleared off the mortgage, im- 
_ proved his place, and gained a soothing sense 
of financial security, he will provide books, 
piano, music lessons, travel, and college educa- 

149 


CHANGING AMERICA 


tion for his children, even if in the mean- 
time his own capacity to enjoy has been 
atrophied. 

The surest proof of the Westerner’s hidden | 
idealism is his response to the charm and appeal 
of girlhood. No people in the world offer so 
many of their daughters a college education or 
discriminate less against daughters in providing 
opportunities. 

Not long ago I talked with one of our best art- 
ists in black-and-white returning from his first 
trip to the West. “ Yesterday,” he said, “I saw 
in St. Paul a wonderful and beautiful thing, 
which would be impossible in New York City or 
in Europe. It was Tag Day, and on the street 
corners and in the lobbies of hotels and office 
buildings were stationed couples of bright-eyed 
girls in their teens, soliciting contributions to 
charity. Here were these pretty, unchaperoned 
young creatures accosting every man who passed, 
and yet I doubt if one of them met yesterday 
with a word or look that could wound her inno- 
cence. It was Arcadian.” 

SIGNS OF DETERIORATION IN NEW BNGLAND 

Further proof that the wanderers to the West 
differed from the home-stayers is gained by 

150 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


scrutinizing the descendants of those who for 
generations withstood the call of the frontier. 

Of course the growing cities of the East have 
always vied with the frontier in luring the am- 
bitious, and there is, therefore, no perceptible 
difference in fiber between the business and pro- 
fessional corps in the Eastern centers and the 
corresponding element in the cities of the Mis- 
Sissippi Valley. 

Then, too, the already successful and estab- 
lished people in the older communities were 
quite too well off to be attracted by the West. 
Those with the right combination of ability and 
temperament to keep themselves at the top at 
home had no incentive to migrate. Hence “the 
Brahmin caste,” as Dr. Holmes called it, the old, 
influential families of the seaboard States, 
which have given great leadership not only to 
their region, but often to the nation. 

But looking past these conspicuous and well- 
recognized tendencies, one comes upon some- 
thing very significant. In the rougher parts of 
New England to-day one finds old towns that 
touched their zenith eighty years ago. The 
élite of the young people have regularly mi- 
grated, formerly to the West, of late to the rising 

151 


CHANGING AMERICA 


cities of their own region. Aside from the 
aliens that here and there have seeped in, the 
inhabitants are of the blood of those who always 
stayed behind. In such districts the children | 
are, in general, so listless that they have to be 
incited to play. Left to themselves, they do 
nothing but loaf about and play mean tricks on 
one another. Not half the high-school lads will 
watch their ball-team play a match game. They 
shrink from a “hike” of a few miles on a Sat- 
urday afternoon, and find the “ boy scout ” work 
too strenuous. The elderly farmers are ob- 
viously less supple and active than men of fifty 
ought to be. Outsiders agree that the average 
farmer accomplishes no more in three days than 
“a good, bright man” can do in one day. A 
laziness worthy of the hook-worm belt will keep 
a man sitting on his door-step till his barn tum- 
bles down before his eyes. Never-works loaf all 
day about the grocery, the feed store, or the 
livery-stable. In villages still bearing traces of 
the famed New England neatness, loose clap- 
boards, unpruned trees, cluttered-up door-yards, 
broken windows, unpainted houses, leaning 
fences, and crazy buggies testify to the sagging 
of the community below its former plane. Tidy 
152 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


places are to be seen, but the proportion of 
slovens has visibly grown. 

In some of these fished-out communities the 
teachers complain that the school-children do not 
make the progress of children elsewhere. To 
hold the pupil’s attention, it is necessary to keep 
him amused. The mentally incompetent are rap- 
idly increasing, probably because the normal 
couple averages less than two children, while the 
dull has four or five. Intellectual craving is 
very rare, and in a town of fourteen hundred the 
preacher could not recall in his five years a 
youth who had gone to college. 

The comment of the State Superintendent of 
Public Instruction upon the classical academies 
which once flourished in these towns is perti- 
nent. ‘Out of these academies went a steady 
Stream of sons and daughters who were, other 
things being equal, always the strongest of the 
generation, for otherwise they would not have 
gained this education. They became lawyers, 
or physicians, or clergymen, or schoolmasters, or 
business men in the cities, and the girls went 
with them prevailingly to be their wives. The 
unambitious, the dull, the unfortunate boys and 
girls of the old country-side, who could not get 

153 


CHANGING AMERICA 


to the academy, as a class remained behind and 
became the dominant stock. And the old acad- 
emy, having sorted out and sent away the am- 
bitious stock, is now dormant.” 

Social workers doubt if the morals of these 
country boys and girls are as good as they are 
in the ordinary city tenements or on the Bowery. 
With the departure of the finer youths, vanish 
the higher interests that hold up the young. 
Gone are the Singing-schools, spelling-matches, 
and debating-societies that once enlivened the 
long winter evenings. The rising generation 
Seem utterly dead to higher things. Card- -play- 
ing, smoking, dances, and motion pictures sum 
up their recreations, and those who try to inter- 
est them in religion, education, or even sport, 
agree that there is “ nothing to build on.” 

Solitary tippling is in great favor with adults, 
and marital transgressions are frequent. There 
is little public spirit, and men of ample means 
are not ashamed to refuse a contribution to a 
welfare undertaking on the ground that they 
“see nothing in it” for themselves. The pros- 
pering are very furtive about their investments, 
and each strives to hide from his neighbors how 
well off he is. 

154 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


In the communities of which I speak, the 
churches are dead or languishing. In villages 
that once maintained three, two will be found 
boarded up. The habit of church attendance 
has almost died out. The clergymen are in de- 
spair, for their members are elderly people, 
mostly women. Young recruits are not in sight, 
and the church is dropping into the graveyard. 


LACK OF COMMUNITY LIFE 


Although this is an extreme case, the down- 
ward tendency is wide-spread. Says the head 
of the Church and Country Life Department of 
the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions: 

Allowing for some exceptions, not too numer- 
ous, it may be said that throughout the pros- 
perous and productive farming regions of the 
United States, which have been settled for fifty 
years, community life has disappeared. There 
is no play for the children; there is no recre- 
ation for young people; there are no adequate 
opportunities for acquaintance and marriage for 
young men and women; there is not a sufficient 
educational system for the needs of country peo- 
ple, and there is not for the average man or 
woman born in the country an economic oppor- 

155 


CHANGING AMERICA 


tunity within reach of his birthplace, such as will 
Satisfy even modest desires. There is not in a 
weak community that satisfaction of social in- 
stinct which makes it “a good place to live in.” 
Time was in New England and New York and 
Pennsylvania when there was a community to 
which every farmer belonged with some pleasure 
and pride. The absence of community life 
throughout these country regions expresses to- 
day what one man calls “ the intolerable condi- 
tion of country life.” 


OTHER REGIONS THAT SHARD THIS 
RETROGRESSION 


If the moral sag is deepest in certain New 
England spots, it is only because nowhere else 
in the North has a rural population been so 
skimmed and reskimmed. But the thing has a 
wider range than people suspect. The disfran- 
chisement of seventeen hundred citizens of 
Adams County, Ohio, for selling their votes lets 
in a pitiless ray on the dry rot of the lifeless 
communities that have missed the electrifying 
touch of railroad or city. The knots of gaping, 
tobacco-chewing loafers that haunt railway-sta- 
tions in some parts of Indiana suggest that the 

156 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


natural pace-makers of the neighborhood have 
moved on to create prosperity elsewhere. In 
southern Michigan, in Illinois, and even on into 
Missouri, are communities which remind one of 
fished-out ponds populated chiefly by bullheads 
and suckers. 

The investigations that led to the establish- 
ment of the “ county work ” of the Young Men’s 
Christian Association show that rural decay is 
to be found, on the poorer soils at least, in 
purely farming regions as far west as the Mis- 
Sissippi River. “It is like a solar eclipse,” said 
one investigator, “ with its darkest shadow rest- 
ing on the New England hills, and its penum- 
bra reaching out even to regions only two gen- 
erations from the pioneer stage.” 


THE * WE-FEELING ” OF THE WEST 


Whatever be its range, the cause of the phe- 
nomenon is not degeneration, but folk-depletion, 
which seems to have swept west with the same 
pace as the twin blight of soil-depletion. Over 
the leaner areas the more ambitious and stirring 
persons who, had they stayed, would have led in 
community codperation and stamped upon their 
coarser neighbors their own ideals, sought the 

157 


CHANGING AMERICA 


beckoning cities or the inviting soils farther 
West. The longer this drain has gone on, the 
worse the slump. In the younger States the 
Signs of sag fade out, and you find in the coun- — 
try school-houses the same literary societies, de- — 
bating-clubs, and lecture courses New England 
was priding herself on sixty years ago. 

The preacher or teacher stationed in the de- 
caying communities imagines that the heart- 
breaking spiritual deadness he sees about him 
reflects a general condition, and concludes that 
the whole country is on the down grade. It has 
hever occurred to him that the choice spirits 
whose departure has so impoverished the neigh- 
borhood are — many of them — serving as moral 
dynamos to lift the tone, the refinement, and the 
ideals of communities in the West. Let those 
who despond at the spread of caries in the old 
“bone and sinew” of the nation watch the 
crowds — mostly farmers—at some agricul- 
tural fair in one of the States beyond the Missis- 
Sippi. What, he will see there in the way of 
Stature and thew, of poise and carriage, of clear- 
hess of skin and eye, of sobriety and good tem- 
per, of good manners and natural politeness, 
will convince him that there is a morning fresh- 

158 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


ness to balance the twilight that broods over 
some of the old homes of the American stock. 

“ Do you note any difference,” I asked a West- 
ern man in the service of a New England State, 
“between your people and the people here? ” 
“Yes,” he replied, “my own people look at life 
in a big way. They are more willing to co- 
operate, more generous in supporting things for 
the general good, more ready to use the State 
government to serve their common needs, The 
folks here lack the we-feeling. An intense pa- 
rochialism keeps them jealous of their State gov- 
ernment, and a suspicious individualism hinders 
them from working together for their common 
benefit. In many directions I see their narrow- 
mindedness and mistrust of one another holding 
them back from prosperity.” 


THE QUESTION OF VIRILITY 


In an Eastern county-seat town a resident of 
less than two years was able to count among his 
acquaintance forty-seven childless couples. An- 
other informant could recall among fifteen 
couples, friends of his, only three who had any 
children. “They don’t want the bother.” 
School after school that used to boast twenty or 

159 


CHANGING AMERICA 


thirty children is now lonesome with from five 
to ten. There is no way of separating in the 
records the native births from those among the 
foreign-born; but a-state officer versed in sta- 
tistics avers that the American blood is not 
averaging more than one child to the family, 
whereas the aliens exhibit from five to twelve 
children a couple. 4 

But if the old branches on the tree are well- 
nigh sapless, the transplanted scions in the West 
do not fail to put forth young shoots. Children 
in proportion to women are half as numerous 
again in the Middle West as in New England 
and twice aS numerous in the Dakotas. This 
despite the fact that a third of the children of 
New England were furnished by fecund immi- 
grant mothers. 

Not without justice is the West spoken of as 
“virile.” Through the Northeast the women 
outnumber the men, to the point sometimes of be- 
ing a drug in the matrimonial market. In New 
England the shortage of men is three per cent., 
in Massachusetts six per cent. But the Middle 
West shows eleven men for ten women, the trans- 
Mississippi country eight men to seven women, 
and in the Dakotas the excess of men is a third. 

160 


THE MIDDLE WEST 


Hence, as you leave salt water the status of 
women rises until, in the inter-mountain States, 
where there are at least two suitors for every 
woman, the sex becomes an upper caste to which 
nothing will be denied from street-car seats to 
ballots and public offices. 


THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE WEST 


That the divorce rate rises as you go West is 
partly due to the willingness of chivalrous leg- 
islators to put this weapon into the wife’s hands, 
partly to the divorcée’s much better chance of re- 
marriage. It is a curious fact that the order of 
the forty-six States arranged according to divorce 
rates, beginning with the lowest, tallies in a re- 
markable way with the order of the States ar- 
ranged according to proportion of women, be- 
ginning with the highest. 

Any shortage of women that makes the men 
eager suitors alters the terms of the marriage 
partnership to the advantage of the wife and 
betters the lot of the married woman. Accord- 
ingly the codes of the Western States treat the 
wife with more liberality than did the codes of 
the older States, and fairness to women seems to 
be a Western practice that spreads East. In- 

161 


CHANGING AMERICA 


deed, the enviable position of the American 
woman is largely the cumulative outcome of the 
Scarcity value she has for a time enjoyed in the 
newer commonwealths. | 


162 


IX 


THE MIDDLE WEST — THE REASSERTION OF DE- 
MOCRACY 


T has been only a hundred and ten years 
Since the first Yankee church spire rose in 

the Ohio Valley. A century ago Indiana was 
the rawest of frontiers. It is only a rounded 
lifetime since the real beginning of the settle- 
ment of Wisconsin. Forty years ago log houses 
were still common in Iowa. The settling of the 
first tier of States beyond the Missouri River 
was but yesterday. To-day in North Dakota 
traction-engines, breaking the prairie sod with 
a battery of plows, are making quick fortunes 
for up-to-date settlers. Through the Middle 
West, then, survives much of that comparative 
equality of condition brought about by the orig- 
inal access of all to free land. 

What is more, there survives much of the self- 
confident individualism of the pioneers. Even 
after a generation or two of fulfilment and pros- 
perity, the people still think of the West as the 

163 


CHANGING AMERICA 


poor man’s chance, the land dedicated to equal 
opportunity, and they kindle into fierce resent- 
ment when confronted by aggregations of wealth 
and power which seem to lift the high higher. 
and keep the under man down. “They’re a 
bull-headed lot,” laments the adroit wire-puller, 
fresh from the easy political management of the 
non-resistants of the Keystone State. More- 
over, the Old-World bonds of social caste are 
dreaded by the sons of men who, half a century 
ago, endured log hut or sod house that they 
might escape these bonds. The Middle West has 
four millions out of the seven million persons of 
German parentage in this country, and the high 
tide of this immigration coincided with bad po- 
litical and social conditions in Germany. It has 
also over a million from a people that has never 
bowed the neck under the yoke of feudalism, the 
Scandinavians. 

And not a few threads of social idealism have 
been woven into the soul of this Middle West. 
Zoar in Ohio, New Harmony in Indiana, Amana 
and Icaria in Iowa — what generous aspirations 
these recall! Separatists, Rappites, Owenites, 
Fourierites, Inspirationists, Icarians, sought the 
uncrowded West to make their dreams come 
164 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


true. They failed often, and yet they leavened 
great numbers with their vision of a society that 
Should be free from ancient dwarfing oppressions 
and inequalities. Into the ground pattern of 
the East, to be sure, were woven more threads of 
idealism than into that of the Middle West, 
but they lie a century or two farther back, 
and the idealism was moral rather than so- 
cial. 


INVESTMENT EAST AND WEST 


The East has had time to accumulate, and for 
_ two generations it has been exporting capital to 
the less-developed parts, where there are farms 
to improve, mines to open, railways to build, and 
mills torun. In any sightly New England town 
you are pointed out the pleasant homes of cul- 
tivated persons who “inherited money” or 
“married money,” and often derive their income 
from sources beyond their ken — Western rail- 
roads, Southern traction, or Montana copper. 
Of course the Middle West has a very respect- 
able quota of rich men, but it is easier for them 
to find use for their capital in their business. 
The great armies of Security-holders live on the 
Atlantic slope, and their ranks are continually 
165 


CHANGING AMERICA 


reinforced by coupon-clippers “ geek off 7a 


from the rest of the country. 
The mutual savings-banks of the East, with 


their millions of depositors, have about two thou- 


sand millions of money in public and corporate — 
bonds. The great insurance companies are — 


nearly all in New England, New York, New 
Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania, and are as 
heavy bond-buyers as the savings-banks. In 
New York there are 391 firms dealing in securi- 
ties, in Boston 129, in Philadelphia 122, in Balti- 
more 44, in Pittsburgh 39, in Cincinnati 42, in 
Chicago 101, and in St. Louis 35. Plainly, the 
Kast has a long lead as security-buyer, al- 
though a quarter of a billion bonds have been 
marketed in Chicago in a year, and the Chi- 


cago Stock Exchange is growing like a mush- 


room. 


The East, therefore, differs profoundly from — 


the Middle West in that it has a vastly larger 


proportion of investors. It is the home not only © 


of most of the owners of its own enterprises, but 


also of the owners of railways, public utilities, — 
mines, mills, and industrial plants in all parts 


of the country. In the northern Mississippi 
Valley “Eastern money” is a term to conjure 
166 





THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


with, like “ Yankee capital” in the South; and 
the promoter of an interurban or a water-power 
development who has “got Eastern men inter- 
ested’ is looked upon as having taken Croesus 
himself into partnership. New York and Bos- 
ton, for example, are the headquarters of huge 
organizations, capitalized for hundreds of mil- 
lions, which control electric-lighting, power, and 
traction companies in all parts of the United 
States. No doubt, too, the stream of dividends 
from the nine hundred millions of American cap- 
ital in Mexico mostly irrigates the pleasure re- 
sorts between Palm Beach and Bar Harbor. 
There are little old States where the share- 
holders are so numerous that “Strike for your 
dividends!” is nearly as good a vote-winning cry 
as “ Higher wages!” or “ Down with the cost of 
living!” 
INVESTORS’ IDEALISM 

Buoyed up by his life-preserver of assured in- 
come, or afloat on his raft of stocks and bonds, 
the investor is able to look about and see more 
_than the panting swimmer. From investors, 
therefore, has come much of the Support for re- 
forms that clash with the crude instinctive prej- 
udices of the common man. They insisted that 

167 


CHANGING AMERICA 


government must be economical and efficient at 


Pokgiree eS 


a time when the masses were content if only it — 


were popular. They struck at the spoils system 


while yet the plain people naively thought the 


offices “ought to be passed around.” The — 


leisured have led in calling for the reform of our 
consular service and the purging of the pension- 
roll. The “silk-stockings” have stood up for 
the negro or the Indian when the hustling ma- 
jority were too busy to notice his plight. The 
“ white-collared ”’ supported conservation when 
the average American regarded the public 
domain as a grab-bag. To-day the “kid-gloved ” 
champion international peace, while the “ shirt- 
Sleeves” multitude are still finding a childish 
pleasure in ironclads and submarines. 


INVESTORS AND THE RULE OF THE PEOPLE 


But the man on the raft is likely to turn a 
critical eye upon the struggling swimmers. In- 


vestors believe in philanthropy rather than in — 
community self-help, approve “social service,” — 
but shrink from anything that smacks of read-— 


justment, are readier to promote “social wel- 

fare” than to concede legal rights. Mingling 

too exclusively with their own kind, these excel- 
168 





Pole Gary pes 7 


Maly i OR = anata. 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


lent shareholding gentlemen — sons, perhaps, of 
the Puritans or the Quakers — settle into mis- 
trust of the unpropertied, and come to regard 
questions too much from the dividend point of 
view. Gradually two contrasted political creeds 
develop, the one professed, the other believed. 
There is the time-hallowed official creed for the 
Fourth of July, Washington’s birthday, and 
other public occasions; and there is the creed, 
taken for granted in the parlor-car, the billiard- 
room, the library, the lobby, and the fashionable 
club, that the people are.the “mob,” and that, 
in the words of old Roger Sherman, “ the peo- 
ple immediately should have as little to do as 
may be about government.” 

It is easy thence to drift on into the board- 
room view that the skilful party managers, who 
keep the people amused with the semblance of 
power while they pull the wires in the primaries, 
conventions, and caucuses where government is 
actually shaped, are necessary to the rule of 
property, and every “reform” that weakens 
party hold or makes the chosen official obedient 
to the public instead of to the party boss is rey- 
olutionary and subversive. 

The hundreds of thousands of security-holders 

169 


CHANGING AMERICA 


in the East constitute, therefore, a powerful con- 
Servative element which continually retards that 
region in its democratic development. The 
Middle West is no more fecund in constructive 
ideas, but it ripens them sooner. The same re- 
Sentment against chicane and boss rule may 
smolder in the hearts of the plain people on both 
Sides of the Alleghanies; but it is far harder for 
popular discontent in the East to find able lead- 
ers, break on the surface, and enact itself. 
Where investors are many, their sentiments per- 
vade the air, and affect the organs that guide and 
voice public opinion. Unconsciously the chair, 
the pulpit, the rostrum, the Sanctum, and the 
Salon are tinctured by the political creed of this 
element, which is close-knit, positive, and in- 
fluential. No wonder, then, that the East con- 
tinually hovers between opposite tendencies — 
to become like Europe, because it is the Mecca 
of America’s rich and the world’s poor, and to 
become democratic and national, in sympathy 
with the impulses that reach it from the vast in- 
terior. 

In the East, many men of high ideals and in- 
dependent means have enlisted in politics on the 
Side of the public welfare, and have served as a 

170 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


kind of counterpoise to the selfish machines; 
but, as you leave the investor belt and enter the 
younger America, the number of sturdy idealists 
whose income goes on whether they win or lose 
to-day’s fight is very few. The political Hes- 
sians know they can tire out the leaders of the 
people because these sooner or later must return 
to their neglected callings, leaving the party ma- 
chines masters of the field. It is not surpris- 
ing, then, that the people of the West do not 
rely on the aid of chivalrous Lafayettes, Steu- 
bens, and Pulaskis from the propertied class, but 
purpose to safeguard their dearest interests by 
bringing government more immediately under 
their own control. 


THE WEAK PARTIZANSHIP OF THE WEST 


In struggling to gain this control, the people 
of the West have an advantage in that they have 
not been wont to identify the foundations of 
their prosperity with the continuance of one 
party in power. The Republicanism of the West 
has not been of the hidebound sort one finds in 
certain old manufacturing States like Pennsyl- 
vania or Rhode Island, whose outraged citizens 
can be brought into line at the eleventh hour by 

171 


CHANGING AMERICA 


the dread of losing their tariff protection. Their 
Democracy has not been of the fanatical temper 
one finds in the lower South, where good men 
can be rallied in support of anything held neces- 
Sary to keep in power the party claiming to stand 
between them and the “horrors of negro domi- 
nation.” Thanks to this comparative independ- 
ence, the Westerners have had both parties court- 
ing their favor by good works. 


MIDDLE WESTERN PROSPERITY 


Less than twenty years ago the people of the 
upper Mississippi Valley were heavily indebted 
to the East, but since the middle nineties a dra- 
matic change has taken place in their condition. 
The swift shrinkage of the frontier, the abrupt 
slowing up in the creation of new farms com- 
peting with old ones, and the growing plentiful- 
ness of gold, have conspired to bring about a 
great rise in the price of farm products. That 
python, the “higher cost of living,’ which is 
tightening its coils on the families of laborers, 
clerks, and professional men, is to the farmer 
an angel showering him with the good things of 
life. In a decade the acre value of Middle 
Western farm-land has doubled, and the value of 

172 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


the buildings very nearly so. The mortgages to 
the East have been cleared away, and a surplus 
has been accumulated which reveals itself in 
the piling up of bank-deposits and the overflow 
of capital. A Kansas City banker outbid the 
Eastern bankers for the Philippine bond issue of 
1906. Since, thanks to the alien inpouring, the 
Kast maintains its big lead in manufacturing, 
Some expect to see a rapid expansion of the in- 
vestment market in the Middle West in the com- 
ing decade. 

Western farmers are converting much of their 
prosperity into attractive homes, macadam roads, 
asphalt streets, cement walks, spacious parks, 
and handsome public buildings. Telephones, 
bath-tubs, hot and cold water, acetylene gas, 
pianos, gramophones, books, and magazines are 
going into the houses. In January you may find 
half a thousand Northern farmers basking in 
certain of the Gulf resorts. For three years the 
West has been the largest market for the mod- 
erate-priced automobiles. Pennsylvania hag is- 
Sued one automobile license for every 178 of her 
people; Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minne- 
sota have outstanding one license to about every 
100 inhabitants. But Iowa has licensed one ma- 

173 


CHANGING AMERICA 


chine for every eighty-one persons, Nebraska one 
for every fifty-three, and South Dakota one for 
every thirty-five! 

The point of this is that the present political 
ferment in this region, unlike the radicalism of 
the early nineties, is no frothing up from eco- 
nomic distress. It comes not from the disap- 
pointments of men, but from their settled con- 
victions, and no cry that “ hogs is up,” no “ full 
dinner-pail” symbol, can exorcise it. Until 
lately, these men, secure in the belief that the 
fabric of their government was perfect, were giv- 
ing themselves to their private concerns. But 
that Capuan epoch is past. The government in- 
vestigations, the “literature of exposure,” and. 
the endless rumors of deals and mergers, have 
clouded the beaming optimism of the Westerner. 
Since he caught the sound of softly closing doors, 
Since he glimpsed ahead felt-shod financiers slip- 
ping in front of the main social advance and 
stealthily impounding forests, water-powers, ore- 
. beds, oil-fields, coal-veins, water-rights, smelters, 
elevators, packing-houses, patents, and fran- 
chises, weaving, as it were, a barb-wire shearing- 
pen in which to corral the ovine public, the flint 
in him shows, and it takes little to strike fire 

174 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


from him. It is this affrighting vision of mo- 
nopoly that explains the iron determination of 
the people to get a firmer grip on their govern- 
ment. It is true, as witness Oregon, that when 
they get direct legislation they do nothing rad- 
ical with it; but they are thinking of the future, 
like a prudent traveler who looks to his shoot- 
ing-irons before setting out through a country 
infested by brigands. , 

Putting aside the South, let us consider the 
parts played by the Far West, the Middle West, 
and the East in the various extensions of popular 
rule in the course of the last decade. 


DIRECT PRIMARIES 


Beginning in Minnesota’s experiments in 1899 
and 1901, the system of direct nominations was 
well worked out in the Wisconsin and Oregon 
laws of 1904. By the end of 1908 two of the 
three Pacific States and more than half of the 
fourteen Middle Western States had adopted 
mandatory laws covering virtually all State - 
offices. Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania had 
mandatory laws covering all but State offices. 
Since then California, Michigan, and New Jersey 
have fallen in line. Other Eastern States have 

175 


CHANGING AMERICA 


come part way. It is evident that the movement 
for the curtailment of the power of the party 
bosses has become nation-wide, and within five 
years it will be the established American prac: 
tice. | 


COMMISSION GOVERNMENT FOR CITIES 


Hight Western States have constitutional pro- 
visions authorizing municipalities under certain 
restrictions to construct their own charters. 
Nine out of fourteen States in the Middle West 
have granted permission to cities of various sizes 
to adopt the commission form of government. 
In the East, Massachusetts has by special acts 
allowed certain cities to adopt the commission 
form, and New Jersey allows cities to throw aside 
the old cumbrous type of municipal government, 
which offered such opportunities for the corrupt 
Sway of special interests. West of Denver, we 
find twenty-five cities under commission govern- 
ment; between Pittsburgh and Denver seventy- 
one; east of Pittsburgh, ten. 


POPULAR CHOICE OF UNITED STATES SENATORS 


When a “special interest” is brought to a 
diamond-point in a staff of highly paid officers, 
1%6 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


or acquires a razor-edge in the shape of a corps 
of expert lobbyists, it is able to cut its way 
through the more massive, but less concentrated, 
“general interest” that opposes it. As an in- 
creasing number of special interests became 
Sharply apexed, and therefore quietly effective 
at strategic places and moments, the failures of 
legislatures to choose United States Senators 
that represent the people became ever more fre- 
quent and scandalous. Accordingly, the policy 
of letting the voters register their preference for 
Senator has been adopted in some form in all the 
Western States and in New Jersey. 


PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY 


In 1910, Oregon, the experiment-station of de- 
mocracy, provided for a special primary in which 
the people might voice their preference for Presi- 
dential candidates. Since then North Dakota, 
Wisconsin, Nebraska, New Jersey, California, 
Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan and 
Washington have joined her. 


INITIATIVE AND REFERENDUM 


Oregon, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Missouri, 
Colorado, and California have the initiative and 
aby iv 


CHANGING AMERICA 


referendum. In 1910 the people of Illinois, by 
a vote of seven to two, indicated their desire to 
have this check submitted as a constitutional 
amendment, but their desire was ignored by the. 
legislature. In Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, North 
Dakota, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming 
the legislature of 1911 voted to submit the initi- 
ative and referendum as an amendment to the 
State constitution. In North Dakota and Wis- 
consin the proposal must be approved by the 
next legislature before going to the people. In 
Several of the formulated amendments the foes 
of direct legislation have tricked the people by 
framing a system cumbrous and unworkable. 
The constitutional convention now sitting in 
Ohio is favorable to direct legislation. Arising 
in the Far West, where, owing to economic con- 
ditions, the undermining of representative gov- 
ernment by greedy special interests had gone 
further than in the agricultural States, the pop- 
ular control of lawmaking is advancing with 
great rapidity in the Middle West, and will soon 
be mooted on the Atlantic slope. 

In view of the copious and exact knowledge of 
industry that underlies the making of a good 
workingmen’s compensation act, a court-proof 

178 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


public-utilities law, or a scientific insurance 
code, it is not to be expected that the bulk of fu- 
ture legislation in the West will come by rough- 
and-ready town-meeting methods. Organized 
into committees and equipped with a legislative 
reference bureau, the legislature will remain the 
chief smithy for hammering out statutes. The 
reserved rights of the people will serve chiefly 
as a check on unfaithful lawmakers, and make 
it unprofitable for special interests to corrupt or 
own a legislature that “cannot deliver the 
goods.” 


THE RECALL 


Provision for the recall of any elective officer 
who has lost the confidence of the people exists 
in Oregon and California and is proposed for 
Arizona. The amendment before the people in 
Washington and proposed in Idaho and Wiscon- 
Sin excludes judges from the operation of the re- 
call. The sentiment among progressives of the 
Middle West makes it certain that the recall will 
be up for consideration very soon. Its salutari- 
ness in city government under the commission 
plan is widely accepted. Its merit in applica: 
tion to State officers is questioned, especially in 

179 


as 


| 


§ 
; 


i 
| 


| 
| 


L 


CHANGING AMERICA 


its application to judges. It is felt that, unlike 
other elective State officers, the judge is an ex- 
pert, one “learned in the law”; and_it_ is un- 
reasonable that an expert should at every mo-. 
ment submit his actions to the judgment of the 
inexpert. Furthermore, the judge administers 
justice not solely as he will, but as the law has 
been laid down; and it is not certain that the 


\ righteous judge, thus hampered, can avoid gusts 


of unpopularity. It is possible, then, that de- 
mocracy will take a fresh tack. The strong feel- 
ing against judges arises from their frequent 
overturning of hard-won remedial statutes on the 
ground of alleged unconstitutionality. Some 
progressives propose that when one organ of 
government declares to be unconstitutional the 
act of a codrdinate organ, the issue thus made 
up Shall go to the people, whose will the consti- 
tution purports to embody. In a word, they 
would leave the court only the power to force 
any act of the legislature deemed unconstitu- 
tional to a referendum. 

Whatever the devices that may finally be 
worked out, it is certain that the people are as- 
Suming more control over government. This 
does not mean, however, that the conditions un- 

180 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


der which the insurance business or the railroad 
business is to be carried on are to be settled by 
the lone farmer at the plow’s tail, by the work- 
ingman at his noon lunch, and by the street- 
corner crowd in the light of soap-box ora- 
tory. 


THE GROWING INTELLIGENCE OF THE PEOPLE 


In thirty-eight years the proportion of chil- 
dren enrolled in the common schools has grown 
from 61 to 72 per cent.; the length of the 
School term from 132 to 155 days; the yearly 
Schooling for each child from 48 days to 81 
days. The expenditure per pupil has more 
than doubled and the per capita outlay 
is two and one-half times as great as 
forty years ago. And fit guides of public 
opinion are growing in number. In thirty years 
the secondary schools of the nation have grown 
from 1400 to 12,000. During the last eighteen 
years the proportion of youth receiving high- 
School instruction has doubled, while the enrol- 
ment in the public high schools has more than 
quadrupled. As for the colleges, their attend- 
ance increased 400 per cent. while the popula- 
tion was gaining 100 per cent. 

181 


CHANGING AMERICA 


THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF THE VOTER 


In Oregon arguments for and against every 
measure submitted to the electors are condensed 
into a booklet and mailed from the office of the 
Secretary of State to every voter at least fifty- 
five days before the election. Oklahoma makes 
Similar provision. Several cities publish a 
gazette to keep the voters informed on municipal 
affairs, and in Oregon the reformers have pro- 
posed a state gazette to help the people audit 
their government. 

In the Mississippi Valley the national move- 
ment for the wider use of the school plant is ex- 
tending the opportunity which school-houses 
offer for the gathering of citizens to consider 
questions of common welfare. A recent Wiscon- 
Sin law orders that “where the citizens of any 
community are organized into a non-partizan, 
non-sectarian, non-exclusive association for the 
presentation and discussion of public questions,” 
the school board shall accommodate them in 
Some school building and provide, free of charge, 
light, heat, and janitor service. Such neighbor- 
hood citizenship organization buttresses the 
foundations of democracy, and in the Middle 

182 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


West the movement is spreading like wild-fire. 
Of late no fewer than ten state universities and 
colleges have adopted “social center develop- 
ment” as a part of their extension work. 


THR PRACTICAL OUTCOME 


The reassertion of democracy has been 
prompted, not by seditious intent, popular self- 
conceit, or the seduction of strange doctrines, but 
by prudence. Bitter experience has taught the 
people that the secret rule of certain kinds of 
property or certain kinds of business through the 
party machines means things abominable — pred- 
atory vice, private monopoly, the wasting of nat- 
ural wealth, overworked children and women, in- 
dustrial oppression. On the other hand, with gov- 
ernment made more responsive to the prevail- 
ingly humane and righteous wishes of the people, 
we may look the sooner for the legal protection 
of the weak in industry, workingmen’s compen- 
sation, legal standards of housing, the regulation 
of public utilities, the supervision of insurance, 
perhaps the guaranty of bank deposits, and the 
taxation of site values. 

No doubt certain forms of acquisitive enter- 
prise will suffer. The peddling of extra-hazard- 

183 


CHANGING AMERICA 


ous securities, counterfeiting in the form of 
stock-watering, the use of unfair methods against 
smaller business competitors, the impounding of 
stock in holding companies, the enchaining of | 
banks so as to monopolize credit —all such ex- 
ploits are likely to be outlawed. Promoters, 
_ developers, security-manufacturers, speculators, 
and monopolizers will find themselves hampered, 
and will, no doubt, complain that the stakes are 
smaller and the game is less interesting. 

The swaying ideas in this democratic move- 
ment are not parts of an imported philosophy 
of overturn. In Oregon or Kansas or Wiscon- 
Sin probably not one man in twenty has ever 
heard family, property, or State seriously called 
in question. Nowhere in the nation is the in- 
stitution of property more respected by the plain 
people than in the farming Middle West, where 
ownership is easy and a proletariat hag hardly 
begun to form. 

Recently a Chicago woman who knows labor 
campaigned rural Illinois in behalf of woman 
suffrage; and this is what she noted: : 


The eyes of the farmer are cold, clear, and steady, as 
if he had never been torn or confused by any great grief 
or fearful crisis. The burning look in the eyes of the city 
workman who knows that he is exploited and who has no 


184 


THE REASSERTION OF DEMOCRACY 


redress, no home, no security, no fruit of his toil — this 
look I never once saw in the eyes of the men down State. 


From such people nothing more alarming is 
to be expected than sober efforts to safeguard the 
public welfare where it is menaced by private 
enterprise, and to broaden individual oppor- 
tunity where it is abridged by massed capital. 


WILL THE WEST CONVERT THE EAST? 


It is an old, old thing, the reaction of the 
frontier upon the seaboard. “In nearly every 
colony prior to the Revolution,’ says Turner, 
“struggles had been in progress between the 
party of privilege, chiefly the Eastern men of 
property allied with the English authorities, and 
the democratic classes strongest in the West and 
the cities.” All through American history de- 
mocracy has been like a trade-wind, blowing ever 
from the sunset. The young States of the Ohio 
Valley led in multiplying the number of elective 
offices, in introducing rapid rotation in office, in 
submitting State constitutions to popular rati- 
fication. Class bulwarks of colonial date were 
thus pounded to pieces by the surf of democratic 
sentiment from the West. Jeffersonian and 
Jacksonian Democracy, Lincoln Republicanism, 

185 


CHANGING AMERICA 


Grangerism, Populism, Bryan Democracy, 
Roosevelt Republicanism — wave after wave has 
rolled seaward, loosing the East from its Old- 
World or “ first-family ” or “ best-people ” moor- 
ings. Some of these impulses were wrong- 
headed and died away, others prevailed, and the 
sum of these successful Western initiatives is 
what we offer to the world as the American po-. 
litical system. 

There are, to be sure, very good reasons why 
the East might reject the new democracy. With 
its legion of intelligent investors and its multi- 
tude of ignorant aliens, it might well plead: 
“Leave me alone. Your case is not my case.” 
But the nationalizing forces are hard to with- 
stand. The tendency toward unity of institu- 
tions all over the nation is stronger now than 
ever before. Twenty years ago who expected 
there would ever be so much populistic opinion 
along the Hudson or so much capitalistic senti- 
ment along the Missouri as there is to-day? If, 
then, the past is a safe guide, we may look for 
the East to be shaken presently with the same 
democratic revolution that is accomplishing it- 
Self in the States of the Far West and the Mid- 
dle West. 

186 


x 


THE MIDDLE WEST — STATE UNIVERSITIES AND 
THEIR INFLUENCE 


OME years ago the thesis of a graduate stu- 
dent in the University of Nebraska shed new 
light on the memorials presented to the National 
Assembly of France in 1789. In reviewing it, a 
savant of the Sorbonne commented on the re- 
markable fact that the French should learn some- 
thing about the causes of their revolution from 
the scholarship of a young university established 
in a region that, when that revolution occurred, 
knew only the redskin and the buffalo. To 
Americans the type of foreign compliment is 
familiar, but let it stand as a just tribute to the 
swiftness with which the higher life unfolds in 
the newer West. 

The thirteen state universities of the Middle 
West dispose of over $11,000,000 of working in- 
come and maintain 3000 professors and instruc- 
tors teaching 35,000 young men and women. 

187 


CHANGING AMERICA 


The thirteen leading endowed institutions of the 
East, namely, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cor- 
nell, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Massachusetts In- 
stitute of Technology, Brown, Dartmouth, Tufts, — 
Syracuse, Williams, and Amherst, have 34,000 — 
students, taught by 4000 men, and enjoy a work- 
ing income of about $13,000,000. The differ- 
ence between the groups is not great, but the 
Significant thing is that the Western universities 
have been growing in attendance about twice as 
fast as the Eastern institutions. At present 
they have four times as many students as they 
had twenty years ago, and five times as large a 
teaching force. Meanwhile the value of their 
buildings and grounds has increased fourfold, of 
their libraries and equipment sixfold, and their 
total working income more than eightfold. De- 
Spite such noble foundations as those of North- 
western and Chicago, educators generally real- 
ize that in the Middle West the future lies with 
the State institutions. 


THE RISE OF THE STATE UNIVERSITIES 


The vast resources of Harvard, Yale, and Co- 
Jumbia are the slow accumulation of time, and 
188 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


represent the gifts of several generations. The 
Middle West, too, would have had such founda- 
tions had it been willing to wait for wealthy 
donors. In its early period, indeed, colleges 
_ were thickly planted, and they were as gener- 
ously supported as were the Eastern colleges in 
their adolescence. Forty years ago such insti- 
tutions as Oberlin, Wabash, Knox, Northwestern, 
Beloit, and Iowa were playing a leading role. 
Then dawned the era of specialized and costly 
education, the era of laboratories, collections, 
workshops and gymnasiums, and the church col- 
leges were unable to meet the demand. Unvwill- 
ing to let two or three generations of her young 
people miss their chance while the colleges were 
Slowly gathering endowments, the State enlarged 
her heart and began to give generously to the uni- 
versity that, under the ordinance of 1787, had 
been planted in each commonwealth of the 
Northwest and endowed with public lands. 
Thanks to the agitation for State aid, the people 
of the West have come to a different conception 
of the role of higher education from the people 
of the Northeast. They regard it less as the 
basis of individual success than as a sure means. 
to social progress, and they agree that the State 
189 


CHANGING AMERICA 


should bear a part of the cost of social progress. 
In the last fifteen years, moreover, the ominous 
drift toward economic inequality has made them 
Solicitous to bring about a greater equality of | 
opportunity. To make education free from sill] 
to capstone appeals to them as one safe way to 
counteract the sinister forces of social stratifi- 
cation. It is this unspoken concern for the fu- 
ture of democracy that prompts the two or three 
millions of people in a Western State to build up 
& university that would be the glory of a Euro- 
pean kingdom. 

President Pritchett of the Carnegie Founda- 
tion for the Advancement of Teaching points out 
that these Western States “ represent a differ- 
ent stage of educational consciousness from what 
one sees in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, 
Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. Penn- 
Sylvania, for example, is one of the oldest and 
richest States of the Union. It has no debt, and 
has an enormous income. In no other State has 
the individualistic conception of education 
lingered longer. Aga whole, the State has never 
come into a conception of education from the 
point of view of the whole people. As a conse- 
quence, its public-school system is still in its 

190 


=a 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


rudimentary stage; its normal schools are pri- 
vate enterprises, and the normal schools and 
many of its colleges are engaged in the work of 
Secondary education. The only evidence of a 
state-wide interest in education is to be seen in 
its series of appropriations to private institu- 


_ tions — colleges, hospitals, and charitable con- 


cerns — which makes education in that old and 
rich State a part of the politics in which Penn- 
Sylvania has achieved so bad an eminence.” 


THE AVALANCHE OF WESTERN STUDENTS 


The offer of a college course at a nominal 
fee has brought down on the Western colleges a 
veritable avalanche of students. Massachusetts 
has 223 of her youth in college for every 100,000 
of her population, while New York has 198 ma- 
triculates. But Illinois and Wisconsin have re- 
Spectively 230 and 246 sons and daughters in 
college for every 100,000 of population. The 
two Eastern States boast of many famous edu- 
cational centers, but fewer than half the students 
in Massachusetts colleges come from the Bay 
State, and only three-fifths of those in New 
York colleges hail from the Empire State; so 
that the college trend in these States by no 

191 


CHANGING AMERICA 


means matches the glory of their universities. 
When you stop to consider, it is wonderful 
that in communities only a life-time from the 


red Indian the pursuit of higher studies should — 


already have come up abreast of that in com- 
munities with a start of two centuries. In view 
of the fact that a third of the Illinois youth any- 
where in college and two-thirds of those of Wis- 
consin are enrolled in their State university, it 
is certain that nothing but the State’s shoulder- 
ing of the burden of higher education as a part 
of its duty to posterity has enabled the Middle 
West so soon to overtake the East. 

The difference in tuition between the big uni- 
versities of the two regions runs from $125 to 
$200. There is also a difference in the cost of 
living, and, what is more, in the prevailing style 
of living. It will cost a Wisconsin student at 
least $500 less to obtain a first-class degree than 
it will cost a Massachusetts student, and this is a 
great lift to any one who is on his own resources. 
It is gratuitous education, not a sharper thirst 
for learning, that accounts for the much larger 


proportion of Western young people who, by — 


stretching on tiptoe, contrive to pluck the col- 
lege sheepskin. The State’s Standing offer to 
192 


EE SS ee 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


give away instruction costing it from $400 to 
$600 draws out an astonishing number of aspi- 
rants from families with small means. Indeed, 
there seems to be no limit to the number of high- 
School graduates who can achieve four years at 
college if they have set their hearts on it. One 
can forgive corybantic athletics, wandering glee- 
clubs, itinerant dramatic troupes, and other 
Spectacular by-products of university life in view 
of their publicity value. They inspire longings 
in young people who, once they are on the cam- 
pus, will wake up to their opportunities. Just 
So the numerous bread-and-butter courses lure to 
the university talented striplings who will in the 
end develop a taste for culture. And the clever 
are not slow to use these courses as decoys. Far- 
mer Skinflint’s boy persuades his father to give 
him a chance by harping on the courses in stock- 
judging, soils, and plant diseases. Gradgrind’s 
Son wheedles the old man by talking up the in- 
struction in accounting and business manage- 
ment, while the daughter points him out studies 
that fit a girl to be factory inspector, settlement 
warden, or social-center secretary. 

Once he is past his freshman year, the bright 
youth contrives somehow to work himself 

193 


CHANGING AMERICA 


through. He tends furnace, waits on table, 
washes dishes, hammers out calculus while night 
clerk, lives out of a paper bag, scissors his cuffs, 
blacks his shoes with stove polish, and in the 
end scores above the dawdler who commiserates 
him from the cushioned window-seat of a luxu- 
rious chapter-house. 


THE STATE UNIVERSITY AS ALMA MATER 


The sum of the ages of the half-dozen leading 
universities of the East is fully a thousand years. 
The ages of the six great state universities of the 
Middle West amount to only three centuries. To 
those with a historical sense the difference in 
venerableness is impressive, and they fancy the 
Western undergraduate is missing something 
Sweet and mellowing. The fact is, to the aver- 
age collegian the hoar of antiquity means noth- 
ing, for he cannot appreciate it. To him a col- 
lege is as venerable as are its elms. A shaft on 
the campus to the unreturning boys of ’61 moves 
him as much as a tablet to the sacrifices of Alma 
Mater in the Revolution. The student body 
changes every four years. Ten generations have 
passed through the college halls while the wheel 
of life outside has made one turn. A student 

194 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


custom started by men who are now inventors, 
explorers, judges, and senators is revered as 
much as we grown-ups revere Charter Oak or 
Liberty Bell. The students in the Western uni- 
versities, then, do not miss that rime of age their 
elders make much of. To them the plain gray 
buildings, with small-paned windows recalling 
the middle of the last century, are charged with 
Sentiment, and the traditions of the place are as 
the law of the Medes and Persians. The Wis- 
consin graduate, delirious in a Philippine hos- 
pital, is as likely to babble of the graceful fox- 
squirrels that chase one another in the campus 
elms as is the fevered Princeton man to rave of 
the pleasant twilight singing on the steps of 
Nassau Hall. 

Some imagine a state university has to be 
bleak and utilitarian, like an industrial school 
or asylum for the blind. Now, aside from 
two or three that have had Aladdin’s lamp 
to rub, the endowed institutions do not surpass 
the commonwealth colleges in beauty of grounds 
and architecture. But, in any case, it is not 
towers and arcades that make a college loved. 
To how many promising farm lads, tired of 
“playing chambermaid to a cow,” to how many 

195 


CHANGING AMERICA 


bright girls, eating out their hearts in a dull 
country town, the state university has opened a 
celestial vision! Tax-money or gift, it makes no 
difference what builds the college, if only it is 
there one catches the Gleam. As youth passes 
through these halls, it decks them with tradi- 
tions, gilds them with poetry, and hallows them 
with dreams. If it have a torch to pass on, the 
commonwealth college will be loved, cannot help 
being loved. So the student customs strike 
root, the classes plant their ivy, the alumni hold 
their reunions, and the “old grads,” grizzling 
about the temples, sing with a catch in the voice 


Here’s to good old Kansas, 
Drink her down, drink her down! 


just as they do in the halls of John and Eli. 
STATE UNIVERSITY ATMOSPHERE 


The state universities have the taint of use- 
fulness, and those who care most for social pres- 
tige send their sons to a salt-water college. 
Leisure-class tastes and ideals are much more in 
evidence at the old endowed institutions. But, 
despite the atmosphere of earnestness and work, 
eager, Speculative minds do not always feel 
themselves at home in the state university. Sur- 

196 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


round a thousand young people who love knowl- 
edge for its own sake with two or three thou- 
Sand others who value it as a saddle-beast that 
will carry them to the top of the hill, and they 
will miss the ozone of Parnassus. With its vast 
provision for professional and technical studies 
and its swelling concourse of the practical- 
minded, the state university is not the ideal re- 
sort for the student of an intellectual temper and 
a disinterested interest in things. The utili- 
tarian spirit of the place leaks in at the keyhole 
and dulls the edge of speculation. There is too 
little of that eager discussion of questions reli- 
gious, ethical, philosophical, and social, which 
Springs up naturally in the isolated college of 
purely liberal studies. It is bad form to be 
keen about the problems of life, and the youth of 
parts, finding his advances met with raised eye- 
brows, goes away sometimes with his yearnings 
unsatisfied. 

The courts have settled it that in the tax-sup- 
ported institution there can be no compulsory 
daily chapel, no required Bible study and “ Chris- 
tian evidences,” with Paley and Butler in the 
Senior year. Darwin and Spencer are not anath- 
ema, and one cannot guarantee the “ religious 

Loy 


CHANGING AMERICA 


atmosphere ” promised by the denominational 
college. Yet somehow the student’s character 
has suffered less than was expected. It would 
take a bold man to arraign the state university 
product as inferior to the output of the college 
in moral principle and spirit of service. The 
secret is that religion has been there all the time, 
but it has been home-grown rather than catered. 
Student and faculty volunteers contribute to the 
quickening of the religious life, the denomina- 
tions build their hostels and maintain their stu- 
dent pastors, religious leaders with a message 
are brought in, and no one fears lest in the state 
university the things of the spirit are falling into 
neglect and decay. 


COEDUCATION 


The assumption that Helen shall go to college 
as well as Walter is general in the West, and 
nineteen times out of twenty Helen will be co- 
educated. The tax-supported university has per- 
force to open its doors as wide to women as to 
men, and the approaching tide of equal suffrage 
makes it certain that if in the future either sex 
is to be discriminated against, it will not be 
women. If ever a new departure confounded the 

198 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


prophets, it was coeducation. It has not bred 
license and scandal. The young women have not 
been masculinized. I asked a young woman who 
divided her time equally between Vassar and 
Wisconsin, “ What is the difference between the 
girls there and here? ” 

“Oh, at Vassar we are so much more self-re- 
liant. Here the girls simply sit back as meek as 
mice and let the men run things.” 

The early “co-eds” were ultra-earnest, so it 
used to be said that the coeducated girl turned 
out a blue-stocking or a frump. Now that the 
“daughter of Eve” type is attending in ever 
greater numbers, it would be quite as fair to 
charge that coeducation hatches out a butterfly 
or a flirt. One president notices “a tendency 
for the men to fix the standards, not only for 
themselves, but for the women,” and observes 
that the women “regard as successful the one 
who is attractive to the young men.” The fact 
is, of course, that the presence or absence of male 
students is of little consequence in Helen’s edu- 
cation. The type of college girl — which, like 
De Vries’s Cinothera Lamarckiana, seems to be 
in a state of lively and startling mutation — is 
formed in the family and society rather than in 

199 


CHANGING AMERICA 


the college. Anyway, it is the coeducated girl 
who secures the truly feminine education; for 
the studies of Vassar women and Williams men 
are more alike than are the courses chosen by the 
two sexes in the liberal arts college of a Western 
university. 


STATE UNIVERSITY AND DENOMINATIONAL 
COLLEGES 


The amazing growth of the state university 
has made mock of all prophecy. When Ne- 
braska laid out Lincoln, her capital, in 1868, 
four city blocks were deemed ample for the state 
university, although land was to be had for a 
song. To-day the campus is overcrowded and 
hemmed in by the city, yet the university cannot 
remove to the outskirts without sacrificing more 
than half a million dollars’ worth of buildings. 
When, in the early eighties, the Regents of the 
University of Minnesota found themselves with a 
building appropriation of $30,000 a year for six 
years, the president of the board said he thought 
Minnesota would be greatly displeased if the 
university with that sum did not build all the 
buildings it would ever need. Now one state 
university has nearly $1,000,000 worth of build- 

200 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


ings under construction, and the architect is told 
to plan for 10,000 students. 

When in the seventies the state university 
sought to supplement the income from its lands 
by calling upon the legislature, the banded de- 
nominational colleges often fought the university 
appropriation, and I can remember when it was 
a part of the duty of certain persuasive profess- 
ors to lobby at the capitol for the university bill. . 
The great freshet of students, beginning in the 
late eighties, allayed the fears of the colleges lest 
their classrooms be emptied, and reconciled them 
to state support of the university. In some cases 
they now coéperate with it in entrance require- 
ments, fit their work into its scheme, and under 
the advice of its deans recast their courses of 
study with reference to the university profes- 
Sional schools. The college has all the students 
it can well take care of, while on the other hand, 
the university, but for the colleges, would be 
Swamped with undergraduates. So far the State 
cannot tap the Pierian spring fast enough to 
slake the spreading thirst for a higher education, 
and it is fortunate that the colleges are there to 
attract and set to work the gifts of generous in- 
dividuals. 

201 


CHANGING AMERICA 


UNIVERSITY FINANCING 


“Does n’t it humiliate you,” a great money- 
raising president asked the head of a state uni- 
versity, “to have to wheedle your biennial ap- | 
propriation out of ignorant farmer legislators? ” 

“Tastes differ,’ was the reply. “For my 
part, I’d rather lay our needs before the repre- 
sentatives of the people than hang on to the coat- 
tails of the plutocrat.” In these days of im- 
perative expansion, the head of the private in- 
stitution must be a good beggar unless there is a 
legion of prospering alumni to whose loyalty he 
can appeal. The resulting dependence on the 
rich is anything but dignified. I have seen the 
president of a great university turn, in his com- 
mencement address, to a local capitalist who had 
extended emergency relief, with a sweeping 
obeisance and the salutation, “You, sir, were 
the captain of our salvation!” “The ideal 
founder of a university,’ confided another presi- 
dent to me, “is one considerate enough to die 
promptly.” On the other hand, the distin- 
guished head of a state university felt obliged to 
wait upon a railroad president in the largest 
commercial city of the State and beg that mag- 

202 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


nate to order his railroad legislators to pass the 
university appropriation bill unmutilated. I 
have known such malign corporate domination 
of politics that the professors in the service of 
the State were less free to break a lance for the 
public cause than the professors on a neighbor- 
ing multi-millionaire foundation. The existence 
of the endowed university and the state univer- 
sity side by side is a good thing for academic free- 
dom. In both there are dangers to the scholar’s 
independence, but they are not the same dangers; 
So that the scholar evicted from one may find 
refuge with the other. While the greater insti- 
tutions of both types are reasonably free, this 
unhappily is not true of certain young state uni- 
versities in the Far West, without alumni to pro- 
tect them against the politician; nor is it true 
of many struggling colleges, which show in their 
pasteurized texts and teaching their tenderness 
for the susceptibilities of the possible donor. I 
say “possible,” for if ethics, economics, and 
sociology are chloroformed, it is not for givers, 
but for those who may give. The money that 
“taints” is the money coveted, but not yet ac- 
quired. 


203 


CHANGING AMERICA 


UNIVERSITY-WROUGHT CHANGES 


Watching the transformation of the Middle 
West is like seeing the trick mango-tree grow un- 
der the hands of the Hindu Juggler. Twenty 
years ago in the university of a certain Western 
State there were fewer than 800 students. An- 
other institution was planted near by, a keen 
rivalry sprang up, the legislature began to give 
generously, the young people of the State began 
to take notice, and now there are nearly 6000 of 
them in the two institutions. On public educa- 
tion the effect was magical. Five years after the 
growth began, every high school was able to have 
a college graduate as its principal. Four years 
later it was possible to insist that every high- 
School teacher should be a graduate. Now, even 
the grammar schools are largely in the hands of 
the college-bred, and the staffs of the high schools 
are made up of those who have done graduate — 
work. 

It is sweet to watch the fresh green spread 
after the water has been turned into the irriga- 
tion-ditch. It is sweeter to watch the standards 
of the community rise after the broad stream of 
trained young people begins to issue from the 

204 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


universities and progressively saturate the walks 
and professions. There is soon a marked im- 
provement in the quality of editorial writing, po- 
litical spell-binding, jury pleading, legislative de- 
bate, and commemorative eloquence. Bun- 
combe, bombast, claptrap, and rant wilt under 
the October breath of criticism. The country is. 
leavened with farmers who attend the February 
“short course ” and are proud to be registered 
‘at the university as “ pure-seed raisers” or pos- 
sessors of “accredited farms.” Rural leader- 
Ship passes from the strong pioneer-bred man of 
limited outlook and stubborn prejudices to an 
alert, reading, progressive type molded in the col- 
lege of agriculture and eager to “keep up.” As 
the alumne filter in, the women’s clubs, instead 
of listening to papers on Etruscan art and 
miracle plays, take to studying milk supply, 
charity organization, and retardation in the 
schools. Legislative committees begin to be 
overwhelmed with damning facts about cash- 
girls, factory women, and industrial diseases, 
gleaned by fair bachelors in the college settle- 
ments. The paunchy, overjowled deadheads 
who embezzle the local party organization and 
snuggle ever closer to the business interests that 
205 


CHANGING AMERICA 


“come across,” are annoyed by crisp-speaking 
young lawyers and school principals and elec- 
tricians with pointed questions about assessments, 
paving contracts, and franchises. As educated | 
men filter through the community, reforms are 
Secured that twenty years ago seemed millen- 
nial. The separation of local from State sources 
of revenue, the separation of local from national 
elections, the treatment of a franchise as val- 
uable property, the discriminating between or- 
dinary industry and natural monopoly, the prac- 
tice of scientific charity and penology, the con- 
centration of responsibility. in government — 
these and a score of other good things which once 
Seemed as far above popular comprehension as 
four-dimensional space, have come to pass, 
thanks chiefly to the radiations from the class- 
rooms. 


THE UNIVERSITY AS SERVANT OF THE STATE 
eee 


The University of Wisconsin has led in new 
forms of service which are likely to be taken up 
by other commonwealth institutions. It is a 
matter of common remark by foreigners that our 
State governments are weak on the administra- 
tive side. This is owing to the early democratic 

206 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


dread of a “ permanent office-holding class” and 
the naive faith that any honest, capable citizen 
will “make good” in any office. As a great 
variety of new tasks calling for special knowl- 
edge and skill are thrust upon government, the 
old-style, all-around, interchangeable  office- 
holder proves a frail reed to lean on, and the ex- 
pert is called in. Now, a university faculty is 
the natural rendezvous of experts, and nothing 
could be more fortunate than the fact that at 
Madison the demand for experts on Capitol Hill 
and the supply of experts on University Hill, 
a mile away, should meet and satisfy each other,_ 
There are now between thirty and forty faculty 
men connected with the non-political public serv- / 
ice of Wisconsin. The president of the univer- 
sity is chairman of the Conservation Commis- 
sion and member of the Forestry Commission, 
the Free Library Commission, and the Public 
Affairs Commission. One dean is superintend- 
ent of the Geological and Natural History Sur- 
vey and serves on the Fish Commission, the 
Forestry Commission, the Conservation Com- 
mission, and the State Park Board. Another 
serves on the Forestry Commission and the 
Board of Immigration. One professor of bac- 
207 





CHANGING AMERICA 


teriology is director of the State Hygienic Lab- 
oratory. Other professors sit on the Live Stock 
Sanitary Board, the Board of Agriculture, and 
the State History Commission. Divers members — 
of the engineering faculty value public utilities 
for the Railroad Commission. Former pro- 
fessors on the ‘Tax Commission and the Indus- 
trial Commission teach classes without pay. On 
the other hand, the State Forester and the head 
of the Legislative Reference Library offer univer- 
sity courses. Altogether, professors administer 
or advise on nineteen state boards or commis: 
sions, besides being frequently called in by com- 
mittees of the legislature for aid in formulating 
laws. ue effect has been_not to draw the uni- 
versi olitics, but to take out of politics 
State_services calling for expert knowledge. 
‘Thanks chiefly To IMS haps oobperation be. 
tween university and capitol, Wisconsin has 
often been called “ the best-governed State in the 
Union.” 







THE UNIVERSITY AS SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE 


The endowed university owes its benefactors 
gratitude; the state university owes both grati- 
tude and service. In the former a professor 

208 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


feels that his duty is to his science; in the lat- 
ter he feels that his obligation is to the common- 
wealth. In casting about for new ways of mak- 
ing itself useful, the state university cannot but 
question if its task ends with teaching a few 
thousand on its campus. Out in the State there 
are a hundred times as many,— the tortoise upon 
which the commonwealth rests,—held away 
from the campus by the necessity of earning their 
living. What can it do for them? 

The University of Wisconsin answers the 
question by extending its campus to the bound- 
aries of the State, so that it now enrolls more 
students out of sight of its dome than under it. 
In six years its extension work has grown until 
now 5000 are taking courses by correspondence. 
It has sent missionaries through the shops and 
factories and organized groups of artisans who 
prosecute their studies under the stimulus of 
traveling instructors teaching them on employ- 
ers’ time. At three district centers away from 
Madison a staff of half a dozen organizers and 
teachers has been planted, and when the State is 
covered there will be seventeen such districts, 
each served from a convenient center. 

A “bureau of general welfare ” answers thou- 

209 


CHANGING AMERICA. 


sands of questions upon sanitation, economics, 
government, sociology, education, agriculture, 
engineering, manufacturing, etc. The shops and 
laboratories freely test soils, ores, fuels, com- 
mercial fertilizers, building materials, road ma- 
terials, ceramic clays, water Samples, and evi- 
dences of disease. A municipal reference 
bureau furnishes information on municipal sub- 
jects from paving and sewage Maal to play- 
grounds and social centers. 

To serve the active minds at the cross-roads 
and the country town there is a “bureau of de- 
bating and public discussion” which briefs live 
questions impartially and loans packages of se- 
lected material on the subjects the people are 
discussing. Last March it sent out 403 such 
package libraries on 190 subjects to 137 localities 
in the State. It lit up nine debates on capital 
punishment, eleven on the recall, twelve on par- 
cels post, seventeen on commission government, 
nine on initiative and referendum, and thirty on 
woman suffrage. 

If public-spirited men are ready to join in a 
movement for the common good, the extension 
department is there to be used. Thus, besides 
organizing a “municipal and social institute ” in 

a1L0 


a aS eee Eee “a 


UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE 


_ Milwaukee and a state “ bakers’ institute,” it 
has promoted an organization for the reform of 
the criminal law, an anti-tuberculosis confer- 
ence, a state conference on charities and correc- 
tions, and a national conference on civic and 
social-center development. 

Twenty years ago not more than four state 
universities in the land had as much to spend 
for all their work as this university will spend 
for extension the coming year. And it is an- 
nounced that a sister state university will put 
exhibits, lantern, tent, and a staff of lecturers 
into automobiles and hold a “ university week ” 
in strategic centers all over its State. So in this 
line we have had our Burbank. The educational 
“plumcot ” is standardized, any one can get the 
seed, and what one state university does now, 
all will shortly be doing. The fruit will be ripe 
in our children’s time, and it will be sweet. 


a11 


XI 
THE MIDDLE WEST — SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


4 Diaretines is a California type, molded by gold- 

hunting, the Sierra, the red-woods, and an 
ocean that rolls to one’s feet cocoanuts from the 
South Seas. There is, or rather was, a Southern 
type, the product of slavery, plantation life, a 
kindly climate, and the English country-gentle- 
man tradition. But there is no Middle-Western 
type to puzzle the Easterner, for there is in the 
Middle West no soul-mold that the East does not 
know. Along the Ohio and the Missouri one 
finds about the same sort of people to be found 
along the Connecticut, but they occur in different 
proportions. It is this difference of proportion 
that furnishes the key to Middle-Western so- 
ciety. 


SOME GAINS FROM LEISURE 


I have already shown how the political con- 
trast between the two regions corresponds to the 
R12 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


frequency of the investor. Now, similarly, their 
social contrast reflects the comparative strength 
of two elements, the leisured and the pleasure- 
hunting rich. 

Besides the occasional artist or poet, the social 
circles of the East contain a leaven of those who, 
having lived much out of harness, have learned 
to loaf and invite their souls. About the cloth 
one comes gratefully upon persons who have had 
time to discover and indulge a fondness for Eng- 
lish cathedrals, early Florentine art, or Albanian 
ballads; who prick across the conversation on 
some curious and interesting hobby, like missals, 
Satsuma-ware, or Russian folk-lore. Then, too, 
many of inherited leisure have given thought to 
being agreeable, and have lifted the giving of 
pleasure through social intercourse to a fine 
art. 

A recent English visitor complains that we 
use speech for the conveyance of fact, and that 
rarely did he come upon those who know how to 
converse with charm, to play with a topic till 
they kindle brilliancy in the wis-d-vis and he 
goes away pleased with himself and with them. 
This criticism holds for the Middle West, for the 
leisured there are few, and social intercourse is 

213 


CHANGING AMERICA 


chiefly the relaxation of the busy. Graceful 
badinage, like the old-fashioned graceful letter- 
writing, takes time, and both go out when the 
tempo of life is quick. Men of action in their 
playful moods chaff or tell droll stories, and only 
women have time to acquire that happy mingling 
of thought, imagination, and wit which makes 
delightful conversation. 

The same visitor observes that “ absence of 
manners in an American is intended to signify 
not surliness, but independence.” Now, one mo- 
tive that peopled the West was the passion for 
independence, and so it is not surprising that the 
plain people there often suspect manners to be a 
capitulation to the spirit of servility. The rea- 
son why so many hurried visitors dislike the 
Middle West is that they take to be selfish and 
indifferent a people who are not used to express- 
ing in the conventional forms their kindness and 
hospitality. If those who have lived long among 
them resent such criticism, it is because, back 
of the nonchalant, undemonstrative manner, they 
know there is as much justice and good-will as 
there~is anywhere in the world. 


214 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


THE EXODUS OF THE SYBARITES 


Among a people that exalts “doing things ” 
into a kind of religion the successful man keeps 
on with his work even after he has ceased to 
eare for its rewards. Though he have much 
goods laid up for many years, the Middle West- 
erner is loath to say, “ Soul, take thine ease, eat, 
drink and be merry.” So few lay off their 
harness before life’s afternoon that nearly all 
circles tingle with the spirit of the striving. At 
the governor’s ball, all the men you meet are 
workers near the top of their respective ladders 
of endeavor. The drone under forty is regarded 
with impatience, even contempt; for the social 
aspirant is gauged chiefly by his proven worth in 
the competitions of real life. 

To escape this nipping and eager air, those 
who early find themselves in the coupon-clipping 
class drift away from the hustling West to places 
where they can meet other idlers, kill time grace- 
fully with fox-hunt, coaching-party, and horse 
show, and be looked up to as better and happier 
than other people. Then, too, the West is not 
well enough upholstered to make the sybarite 
perfectly comfortable, and so he grayitates 

215 


CHANGING AMERICA 


toward the London hotel where Jeames warms 
the morning newspaper before handing it to 
you, or the Paris restaurant where Gaston, after 
carving your duck, places the carcass in a silver 
press and squeezes you its last savory drop of 
juice. The exodus of this type is a blessing to 
the West, for it postpones the day when the 
noxious idea will take root that the elegant loafer 
is superior to the capable doer. 


THE EXODUS OF MONEYED GOTHS 


The Western millionaire with strong local at- 
tachments cares more for the people among 
whom he has prospered than for Vanity Fair, 
and will not uproot in order that “the girls” 
may have a shy at a titled foreigner. He keeps 
on a human basis with his townsmen, gives freely 
of his time and money to community interests, 
and, when he dies, bequeaths liberally to local 
institutions. 

But there is another type who, once he has 
blossomed into purple opulence, longs for New 
York and Newport, in order to mix in a kind of 
life that can give him his money’s worth. First 
his womenfolk awaken to the limitations of 
Peoria, Grand Rapids, or Sioux City, for they 

216 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


notice they are getting only turkey for their ter- 
rapin. Presently, he, too, confesses that society 
among people who have to observe office-hours 
and eschew golf lacks distinction, and he is ready 
to migrate to Fifth Avenue, which is often only 
a way station for Mayfair or the Avenue du Bois 
de Boulogne. 


GOTHIC SOCIETY AND ITS INFLUENCE 


Like the “ bonanza kings” who left the Com- 
stock lode to go down to San Francisco and make 
Nob Hill a fit launching place for the word 
“ nobby ”; like the cattle lords from el campo who 
flaunt their wealth in the Avenida de Mayo of 
Buenos Aires; like the diamond kings, nitrate 
kings, and Rand magnates who would swamp 
London society with a torrent of expenditure no 
home-grown fortune can match, the newly rich 
from all parts of this country, converging upon 
Eastern centers, particularly New York, seek to 
substitute, for the natural society they find, their 
own notion of society. And their own notion 
is -that society exists to sweeten with the 
charm of social exclusiveness the joint enjoy- 
ment of the costly. In the extravagant, self-in- 
dulgent circles they form there is wrought out an 

217 


CHANGING AMERICA 


Alice-in-Wonderland table of values that stands 
plain common-sense philosophy on its head. Lit- 
erature, the crown of all great society, is little 
respected, or understood. The spender outshines 
the achiever. Publicity is to be sought, not 
shunned. The social bond is not sympathy of 
tastes, but the sharing of expensive pleasures. 
The giver of a new thrill or the inventor of a 
fetching stunt is more of a hero than a Pasteur 
or a Peary. 

From these glittering circles, thanks to the 
yellow press, false standards spread through the 
social body, and corrupt home-bred notions of 
what is fit or decent or worth while. For many, 
pleasure-class example breaks the mainspring of 
useful endeavor. It makes the strung bow envy 
the unbent bow. It makes people who have to 
work hate their work. It makes the functional 
people as grasshoppers in their own eyes. Sery- 
ants it turns into shameless tip-extractors. It 
whets greed and hurries men into graft, extor- 
tion, and monopoly. In the lives of multitudes 
who have nothing to look forward to but the 
common lot it sows the stinging nettle of ungrati- 
fied worldliness. And so the poison leaches 
down through the layers of society. Parents 

218 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


communicate the virus to their children, fashion- 
able schools to their pupils, college fraternities 
to their members. From the pleasure centers it 
spreads to the hustle centers, from the metrop- 
olis to the cities, and from the cities to the towns 
and to the country-side. 

Against this contagion the people of the Middle 
West are by no means proof, but they have the 
good fortune to live rather out of its reach. The 
person ludicrously out of touch with reality 
usually turns out to be of Eastern origin. Even 
leisure-class refinement sometimes makes one un- 
able to tell a hawk from a hand-saw. Add pleas- 
ure-class artificiality, and you get people with 
their feet clear off the ground, like Marie An- 
toinette, who, when she heard the poor crying 
for bread, asked why they did n’t eat cake! Ata 
recent ekklesia of a national Greek-letter fra- 
ternity, an Eastern undergraduate voted against 
chartering a petitioning Western chapter with 
the explanation, “ Somehow I can’t think much 
of fellows that send us a representative who neg- 
lects the crease in his trousers.” “A gentle- 
man,” observed a callow sophomore whose mother 
supports him with her pen, “is a fellow who 
changes all his linen every day.” The rising fees 

219 


CHANGING AMERICA 


of Eastern engineering schools are welcomed by 
some students on the ground that they will ‘ keep 
the muckers out of the profession.” An aston- 
ishing number of Eastern parents will own that | 
they send their sons to college, not for any knowl- 
edge or ideals the faculty may give them, but for 
the ease, polish and desirable social connections 
that may come from four years of college resi- 
dence. The boys quickly catch the idea and learn 
how to intimate delicately to the professors their 
sense of the secondariness of study and the all- 
importance of “ student life and association.” 


SOCIAL DBMOCRACY OF THE WEST 


The Middle-Western students are still naive 
enough to respect knowledge, although, to be 
sure, some of them show their respect by stand- 
ing afar off. Perhaps this is linked up with the 
interesting fact that in the East a fifth of the 
secondary schools are private, while in the Middle 
West only a twentieth cater to social exclusive- 
ness. Nor has the Middle West placed a stigma 
upon labor. It is said that when Senator 
Philetus Sawyer of Wisconsin, who made his for- 
tune out of sawmills, set up his carriage in Wash- 
ington, he appropriately put on it the Latin 

220 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


word “ Vidi,’ which, being translated, signifies 
“T saw.” When John Johnson first ran for gov- 
ernor of Minnesota, his political opponents jeered 
at him as of poor-house extraction. The people 
of the State rebuked the un-American gibe with 
a big majority for the man who had come up by 
his personal merits, and his subsequent career 
justified their estimate. I have heard the wife 
of a Western farmer governor — who did well, 
by the way — confess naively her enjoyment of 
life in the “ Executive Mansion,” and impart the 
confidence, “Do you know, when we go back 
home, I just believe I won’t have the hired men 
eat at the family table. It’s so much nicer with- 
out them.” 

Servants the West welcomes,—although it 
calls them “help,’—but it dreads the servile 
spirit. His French cook or his private car 
might not hurt a candidate for office, but his 
English butler would damn him _ politically. 
“Some time since,’ writes a Kansas professor, 
“a distinguished visitor from the East came to 
the State to deliver a public address. He was 
hospitably received, attentively listened to, and 
highly praised; but to no purpose all these fine 
ideas: the great man was found wanting, for 

R21 


CHANGING AMERICA ° 


there was discovered, among his other impedi- 
menta, a valet. It was a fatal mischance. The 
poor valet was more commented upon than the 
address, more observed than his master. The | 
circumstance stamped the misguided man as : 
clearly not our kind of man. Obviously, no man 
who carries a valet can speak the Kansas lan- 
guage.” 

Although minor place of relaxation are spring- | 
ing up in the Middle West, I think that the pre- 
tentious and costly pleasure-centers of America 
— the cream-pots of the country’s wealth-produc- 
tion — will be situated in California, on the 
Gulf, or on the Atlantic coast. Here most 
nakedly will be exhibited plutocratic pomp, “ the 
lust of the eyes and pride of life,” while most 
of the dwellers in the Mississippi Valley will 
escape ocular infection with foolish standards 
that put people out of joint with their work and 
their attainable happiness. Commenting on the 
irruption of rich summer residents into a charm- 
ing New Hampshire district, a friend says, 
“ These millionaires, with their costly ‘ cottages,’ 
their footmen, and their motor-cars are making 
our farmers feel like peasants.” The Western 
obverse of this is the experience of a colleague 

Ree 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


of mine of Iowa extraction who drove over to the 
old home in his 25-horse-power evidence-of-pros- 
perity, just to let his farmer cousins and neigh- 
bors know he was getting on. ‘“ The joke was on 
me,” he confesses with a chuckle, “for most of 
them had better automobiles than mine, and 
rather pitied me.” 


LEISURE-CLASS ROLE OF WESTERN WOMEN 


If there is a leisure class in the West, it is 
the idle wives of busy, successful men. It is 
they who look out for “tone,” who hit up the 
pace, who see to it that in style of living and 
entertaining their set keeps always a lap or two 
ahead of those with purses a pennyweight lighter. 
It is the high function of these social arbiters 
to “draw the line,’ to make two barriers rise 
where one rose before, to cry, like the celebrants 
of the classic mysteries, 


Procul o procul este, profani! 


And in view of the stubborn democratic preju- 

dices and the exasperated, uncowed common 

sense they have to contend with, who can say 

these ladies have not done wonders? ‘To be sure, 

their men, under the crude notion that “ society ” 
3) 


CHANGING AMERICA 


exists to help you meet people you like, smile at 
Social discriminations turning on the number of 
one’s servants or the horse-power of one’s auto- 
mobile. But gradually the snobbery of the home 
atmosphere gets into their system, and in a few 
years the lumber magnate or the oil capitalist 
with a pretty daughter will send the rising young 
merchant about his business with the hauteur of 
a Spanish hidalgo. 


THE WEST AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 


Strong in the old-American spirit, the Middle 
West scoffs at solving the social problem by 
preaching the “trusteeship of wealth” or ex- 
horting Dives to regard himself as a “ steward.” 
Aware of what H. G. Wells calls “the secular 
extinction of opportunity,” it is not to be recon- 
ciled to social stratification by any amount 
of “welfare work” in the mills or of 
“social work” in the tenements. It knows 
philanthropy is good, but it thinks that the linch- 
pins of society ought to be rights and the spirit 
of square dealing rather than gifts and the spirit 
of kindness. Less advanced in accumulation 
than the East, it puts the welfare of people 
above the rights of property, and anxiously legis- 

R24 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


lates for conditions that will conserve the man- 
hood of the workingman. 

On the whole, the Western States have gone 
further than the Eastern States on behalf of 
labor. They are cutting down the working day 
for women and stopping night work. Illinois 
and Ohio have gone far in organizing factory 
inspection, and Wisconsin leads in creating an 
industrial commission empowered to make work 
places “safe” and “ healthful.” The most 
stringent laws for the protection of workmen in 
building construction are found in Nebraska, 
Indiana, and Oregon. The subject of minimum 
wage is being considered in Minnesota, Wiscon- 
sin, and Massachusetts, and Wisconsin is in the 
van in working out a policy for unemployment. 

Still, this modest lead in labor legislation is 
no just measure of the Middle West’s lead in 
democracy. There is in the East a non-demo- 
cratic force behind such laws. Like the blood 
which secretes a thyro-iodine that regulates 
blood-presure, capitalism secretes a form of capl- 
tal which reacts upon and regulates the indus- 
trial process. Bondholders are interested in the 
core of a business, stock-holders in its margins 
and fluctuations. Regulative laws may shrink 

R2O 


CHANGING AMERICA 


dividends, but the bondholder is sure of his in- 
terest. He does not lose if he follows his con- 
Science in matters of child labor or industrial 
diseases. Now, in the East one finds a growing 
number of bondholders — widows and spinster 
daughters of rich men, heirs indifferent to money- 
making — who feel social compunction and in- 
terest themselves in social reform. In the Mid- 
dle West, outside a few large cities, the people 
of means who are semi-detached from industry 
and care for social reform are very few. Hence, 
in the Middle West social legislation witnesses 
to the instinct of the plain people rather than to 
the initiative of the leisured. 


CULTURE EAST AND WEST 


Fifty years ago family intercourse, money- 
making, religion, and politics summed up the 
strong interests of life in the Middle West, while 
music, art, literature, and science were neglected. 
Outside a few university centers, easy popular 
standards of excellence prevailed, and there was 
little spur to high achievement in any line. If 
we note the birthplace of the first thousand of 
living American men of science, we find that 
509 of them were born in the East, and only half 

226 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


as many in the Middle West. Yet, in 1860, 
about the time these future scientists were com- 
ing into the world, the Middle West had six 
sevenths as many people as the East. The dif- 
ference measures the former backwardness of the 
West in cultivated homes, educational oppor- 
tunities, and stimulus to scientific pursuits. 
Again, of living Americans listed in “ Who’s 
Who in America,” the Middle West contributes 
44 for every 100,000 inhabitants it had in 1860, 
while the East contributes 82, or nearly twice 
as many. 

Since then the progress of the region has been 
so rapid that to-day it stands virtually abreast 
of the East in visible provision for the higher 
life. Comparison of the two regions in literacy, 
in public instruction, in state aid to schools, in 
library extension, in penal systems, in state care 
of defectives, in anti-tuberculosis activities, in 
city-park systems, and in the beauty of public 
buildings, shows little or no difference. The 
East is ahead in urban sanitation, the Grange 
movement and the woman’s club movement, while 
the Middle West makes the better showing in 
city-planning, state parks, and the establishment 
of legislative reference libraries. In public 

227 


CHANGING AMERICA 


libraries there is a gap, narrowing, but 
not yet closed. The West has only two 
libraries where the East has three, owns less 
than half as many books, and reports only two 
thirds the number of book-borrowers. The fact 
that the libraries of the older region have eight 
times as much endowment throws some light on 
the difference. 

Some years ago Mr. Howells made the start- 
ling suggestion that perhaps the literary capi- 
tal of the moment was not New York or Boston, 
but Indianapolis. It is indeed, not easy to ex- 
plain the Indiana group of imaginative writers, 
and one feels there is no telling when a spring of 
literature may open still farther west. On the 
other hand, when one marks the strength of their 
German element, one does not marvel that Cin- 
cinnati and Chicago support as good musical 
organizations as can be found in the United 
States. 

Recently an Oxford fellow visited us for the 
first time, and in his letters to an architect 
friend in England he commented unfavorably 
upon the people of the Middle West. “What you 
say about those Americans is incredible,” wrote 
back the Englishman. “If they care so little 

228 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


for beauty, tell me why is it they are at present 
putting into their homes and public buildings 
some of the finest architecture of our time?” 
Aside from two or three journals read by the 
élite, the newspapers of the East impress me as 
less quiet and sane than those of the Middle 
West. A Chicago news-stand is less suggestive 
of bedlam than one in New York or even in Bos- 
ton. The saffron screamers of the middle-sized 
cities seem to cater to left-behinds, half-baked 
immigrants, and petty social climbers. In cities 
of like size in the Missouri Valley the news- 
papers obviously reflect the taste of a well-bal 


anced and thinking people. 
INTELLECTUAL FAULTS OF THE MIDDLE WEST 


If not many peaks shoot up from this high 
plateau, it is because certain faults vitiate the 
intellectual strivings of Westerners. Not long 
ago the Oxford dons were induced to set down 
their opinion of the Rhodes scholars from 
America. In their confidential reports these 
picked college-bred Americans are described as 
“ superficial and inaccurate,” “singularly un- 
educated,” “lacking in accuracy and the power 
of hard grind,” “inclined to drift from one sub- 

229 


CHANGING AMERICA 


ject to another, resting content with a bird’s-eye 
view,” “ dilettante,” “restless, volatile, never-edu- 
cated griindlich.” There is complaint of their 
“superficiality of training and diffuseness of 
interests,” although some dons admit they are 
“above the average in industry and interest in 
their work.” Now, these are, broadly speaking, 
American faults, but I think the East has got 
rid of them more than the Middle West. In the 
first grapple with nature, alertness and resource- 
fulness are the prime intellectual virtues. It is 
complex society, with its specialization and its 
demand for skill, that drives home the need of 
thorough training and careful preparation for 
one’s work. The vocations are as differentiated 
in the West as in the East, but the slack stand- 
ards of the recent pioneer past live on. 

In the absence of small, well-defined areas and 
of little historic commonwealths, the spatial 
imagination is quickened in the inhabitants of 
this great Mississippi Valley. Nature sets no 
limits, and no community sees reason for impos- 
ing limits of its own making. Hence arises a 
passion for magnitude. The Westerner thinks 
of growth in terms of size, and his taste 
for leaping totals is insatiable. Glibly from his 

230 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


tongue roll figures of crop values, output of fac- 
tories, tonnage totals, trade volume, bank clear- 
ings, height of sky-scrapers, miles of asphalt, 
acres of parks, enrolment of pupils, and member- 
ship in churches. 

This, too, is an American fault, to care more 
for growth in quantity than for refinement in 
quality; but I fancy one has to hunt longer west 
of Pittsburg than east of it for that reflective 
Remnant who wonder if the staggering crop total 
stands for soil-robbing, if the ‘ phenomenal ” 
factory output represents “speeding up,” if the 
swelling rail tonnage reflects headlong deforesta- 
tion — the discerning few who care more for 
deepening popular thought than for expanding li- 
brary circulation, for improving teaching than 
for regimenting more children in the schools, for 
inspiring a feeling for art than for acquiring 
canvases, for spiritualizing lives than for gaining 
communicants. 


THE EXODUS OF THE GREEKS 


There is a marked gravitation of Middle- 
Western ability toward our European frontage, 
where the talents find inspiration, apprecia- 
tion, and a market for their wares. A Western 

231 


CHANGING AMERICA 


city has its distinguished public men,— judges, 
bishops, lawyers, educators, and engineers,— but 
the Eastern city is the Mecca for inventors, chem- 
ists, artists, sculptors, illustrators, musicians, 
and authors. Out of forty-seven residents of 
Springfield, Massachusetts, whose names are in 
“Who’s Who,” twelve are authors and artists; 
out of forty-nine such in Omaha, only three are 
writers. East Orange with fifty-three names 
boasts ten authors; Kansas City with forty-five 
names has none. If the pages of that directory 
are representative, much of the cream of the 
American intellect gathers in southern New 
England and in the vicinity of New York. Bos- 
ton and St. Louis are matched in size; but the 
former has 870 names in “ Who’s Who,” the 
latter only 225. Chicago has forty-one per cent. 
more people than Philadelphia, but only nineteen 
per cent. more citizens of eminence. Hartford, 
a third the size of Minneapolis, has six-sevenths 
as many residents of note. Worcester, with 
fewer people than Toledo, has two and one- 
third times as many citizens one hears about. 
New York has ten times the population of De- 
troit, but it holds thirty times as many persons 
of prominence. Kansas City, twice as big as 
R32 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


Cambridge, has a fourth as many names on the 
roll of fame. To be sure, Bridgeport and New: 
ark and Buffalo come off badly in comparison 
with Denver and Cincinnati, but the fact re- 
mains that out of twelve thousand persons of 
note dwelling between the North Atlantic and 
the Rockies, the East is the home of seventy per 
cent., whereas its proportionate share should be 
only forty-six per cent. 

It is not surprising, then, that in the Middle 
West persons of literary or intellectual note are 
much oftener of university connection than in 
the East. The presence or absence of a uni- 
versity makes a bigger difference than in the 
older region, where more writers and thinkers 
are supported by inherited means or by the 
literary market than by a professor’s salary. 

Besides the emigration of people of talent, 
there is a continual drifting away of persons who 
might help form the taste of their community. 
The Middle West is a far richer area than the 
East. From the eastern edge of Ohio travel due 
west to North Platte, Nebraska,— more than 
twelve hundred miles,— and never at one time 
will you have under your eye two square miles 
of poor land. Clearly, this well-dowered region 

233 


CHANGING AMERICA 


is to be the seat of numbers, comfort, wealth, 
and power. But it is singularly uniform, and, 
though pleasing, is lacking in physical charm 
and striking scenery. The tendency of the Mid- 
dle Westerners who can live where they please 
to seek mountain or sea is already pronounced, 
and will become stronger. The segregation 
process which is making central England indus- 
trial and southern England residential will show 
itself here. People of the interior who do not 
remove to genial Flordia or picturesque Cali- 
fornia will seek the pleasure cities of the sea- 
board, the cultivated suburbs near the big cen- 
ters, or the lovely spots amid the hills, lakes, and 
valleys of the Appalachians. 


WILL THE MIDDLE WEST BECOME LIKE THE BAST? 


Since the East in its colonial period had many 
“Western” characteristics, since the Middle 
West itself presents a smooth gradation,— for 
the traits of Kansas to-day were the traits of Ohio 
in 1850,— some predict that the Middle West is 
to take on in time the present characteristics of 
the East. I doubt it. Certain factors are at 
work that may long ‘hold the two regions apart. 

By its geographical position the Mississippi 

234 


SOCIETY AND CULTURE 


Valley escapes the temptation to look constantly 
across the water and model itself on Old-World, 
especially English, patterns. Screened in a 
measure from the sapping seductiveness of for- 
eign example, it seems destined to be the most 
“American” part of our country. Moreover, 
growth in wealth, prestige, and political power 
will lend it courage to break away from Eastern 
example and dare to be itself. 

While from Western towns stream Conetn aatie 
those who yield to the scenic, cultural, or social 
attractions of the East, there is a counterbalanc- 
ing flow from the older region of persons who 
covet the freedom and unconventionality of the 
West. This interchange of misfits retards the 
assimilation of the two to each other. 

Tinally, since the disappearance of the fron- 
tier, it is the East, not the Nhe that absorbs the 
bulk of immigrants. The sinister phe- 
nomena that more and more crop up in the East 
from the presence of an enormous and growing 
number of.raw aliens cannot but lower the pres- 
tige of the East in the rest of the country and 
lessen the willingness of other Americans to take 
it as a model. 

Still, the nationalizing forces will not be idle. 

235 







CHANGING AMERICA 


No doubt the East will follow the Middle West 
in the assumption of higher education by the 
State, in the restoration of popular control over 
government, in the regulation of railroad and 
public-utility companies, in the extension of 
equal educational, industrial, and political op- 
portunities to women. On the other hand, the 
Middle West will probably become more like the 
East in the strength of the investor element, in 
the consequent tenderness for vested rights, in 
aversion to the wildcat speculative spirit, in 
greater attention to family and lineage, in higher 
standards of technical excellence, and in the con- 
forming of individual opinion to established or 
expert opinion. 


THD END 














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